Harry Potter: Coming Out On Top
by ManMadeOfLasers
Summary: Harry Potter, it can be said, has a pretty rough time of it. He certainly does have to deal with a lot of poor luck and unfortunate circumstance. What if, instead of getting angsty and blundering his way through life, Harry just rides his extraordinarily bad luck all the way to the top? This is Harry owning his destiny. Starts off a little dark, but gets crack-ish pretty quick.
1. Prologue

Prologue

* * *

November first, 1981 was a new day. A changed day. November first was a day that would have been unrecognizable, inconceivable, just twenty four hours before.

Twenty four hours _before_ had been the wizarding holiday and feast day Samhain, known among the more mundane as Halloween. It was the beginning of the dark half of the year, the time when humanity's ancestors took their flocks in and culled them in preparation for the coming cold. This was the time that changed the fate of the world, a fate which had been building for more than a decade.

On this day, in the wee hours of the morning, the self-styled Dark Lord Voldemort came knocking at a charming cottage in the village of Godric's Hollow. He sought to end the life of one prophesied to destroy him, and as is so often the case with prophecies, in doing so brought about his own destruction.

The charming cottage in the valley that was Godric's Hollow was property of the Ancient and Noble House of Potter, and was inhabited by a couple and their child. James Charlus Potter, Lily Marie Potter, and young Harry James Potter.

That quiet and dark morning was interrupted by fire, lightning, the roar and clash of conjured creatures, and finally the silence of death. The gods alone know what transpired in that small home, but the results were free for anyone to see. James and Lily, loving parents and caring friends, were killed. Tom Marvolo Riddle, the Dark Lord, was banished. Harry survived, marked for his short time on this mortal coil by shadowed memories of a family he would never know, and a scar on his forehead.

In the coming years many would remark on the scar. Some would say it looked like a lightning bolt. Others would see it as a mark of a life yet to be lived, a rune forged in the dark heart of a magical event, Sowilō, the mark of the sun. The mark of the purifying light.

Only a sad few would truly see it for what it was. A permanent reminder to a young orphan of what he had lost, nothing more, and in the cruel dance of fate, nothing less.

Mere hours from that act of prophecy Harry James Potter was plucked from the wreckage of his home, and by the order of the reigning leader of the times, sent to live with his last remaining blood relatives. Vernon and Petunia Dursley.

The young couple knew the boy was different. They had known his parents, and they knew the boy was part of something much larger than their lives would ever reach. They hated him for it. Harry was neglected, sentenced to live in a cupboard, a space unfit for even the storage of cleaning supplies. They did not feed him as the tiny child needed, ignoring his cries. They spared no band-aids, no sippy-cups, and no object not already at least third-hand for the boy.

They had their own son, Dudley, a son who grew around, but untouched by, this deprivation. Dudley grew, and he acted on the examples he was given, and soon Harry was target practice for the youngest Dursley and all of his friends. The neighborhood boys were not gentle, and they were not reserved. Without an adult telling them when enough was enough bones were broken and blood was spilled. They behaved with the shameless intolerance and anger that only children possess. Vernon and Petunia were careful to never touch the boy themselves, they had no need to after all, and by an understanding reached inside Harry's earshot, nothing was done in view of the adults letting their abuse of, and power over, this boy continue.

Sometimes life, sometimes magic, and sometimes fate are each curious things.

These actions did not break a child who denied knowledge even of his own name. No. These collective actions forged steel inside the young boy. Fear and adversity enough to destroy anyone else just fed the fire inside him. There was a reason the boy was injured so. He never backed down. His hide bore the work of a gang of budding thugs and he fought them as best he could, knowing that if he didn't no one would.

Thus the stage is set for our tale. In another world, many have remarked that Harry Potter was fate's whipping boy and fate's bitch. What if, on one day early in the year 1990, fortunes were reversed, and instead Harry made fate his bitch?

* * *

[A/N]: 10April2018

After nearly two years of off and on requests, I've decided to re-upload my old works. I still have plans to come back and re-edit. Iron some details out, maybe, and get to the end I've been keeping notes on for two years.

This is my shitty and slow commitment to you, the reader. These works are still on my mind, I've still got notes, and I will finish them. I just have a job, and a few friends, and entirely too much shit to do. But I'll get there.


	2. Wherein fortunes are changed

Chapter One: Wherein fortunes are changed

* * *

Today was one of the days the Boy hated and feared most in the year, the day of Aunt Petunia's annual shopping trip. The Boy was never certain where _they_ found the money for it, but every year on September second the Dursleys went out and had themselves a massive shopping spree. Vernon got a new lawn mower (which the Boy would be forced to use), Dudley was given all of the latest and greatest books, video games, and computer things (which he would subsequently break and the Boy would be forced to repair), and Petunia would get brand new kitchenware and make-up (thankfully the Boy was only expected to take care of the kitchenware). The entire family (sans the Boy) would also get a new full wardrobe to go with their new possessions.

This all was angering, but given what the Boy had seen and faced, completely tolerable, he had seen worse.

No.

The reason The Boy hated and feared this day was because it was the one time in the year in which they actively took him from the house, and Dudley was left with him alone in stores that had display sets of power tools, knives, abrasive cleaning supplies, and other things which the Boy had found to be worrisome in the hands of his tormentor.

The Boy did his level best during the day to stay out of the way. The difficulty was that he had to stay within sight of his relatives at all times, lest he be left behind again. Last time the trip home had taken him the better part of two days and the good will of no less than four separate transit attendants. He had to not only find where home was, but also get back. When he had finally found his way to Privet Drive, he was locked out and left to the mercies of Dudley's gang for a further day and a half before being let back in and sent to his cupboard.

Sometimes the Boy fancied himself one of the ninjas that he read about in the public library. He had gotten quite good over the years at being near enough to follow his relatives, but far enough away or out of sight enough to not attract the attention of his god-forsaken cousin. It hurt less when he made it a game, so he went with that.

But the library. Now there was a thought. The Boy could be there right now, reading and hiding in the back stacks. He could be reading and trying again to figure out the right way to hold a pen to write. Ever since his first year at school, when the Dursleys had so forcibly taken him from his class and claimed they were home-schooling him, the Boy had been trying to figure out how to write. He was rubbish at it and it bothered him, so whenever he was lucky enough to get away he practiced.

Today though, he had no such luck. Today he found himself cornered in the cast-iron cookware section of Petunia's favorite high-end kitchen store in London. Today, his cousin was running full tilt down an isle bearing a 40 cm heavy cast iron pan, wielding it like one of the samurai from the movies he enjoyed so much. Today, the Boy tensed all of the muscles in his torso and tried his best to absorb the blow that he was sure was going to take him forever to heal from.

Dudley made contact with the pan, despite a last moment desperate dodge, and the Boy's world devolved into pain. The Boy could feel the bones in his chest (ribs and sternum, he noted through the pain, anatomy texts had proved invaluable to his medical efforts in the past) snap as the energy of the blow broke his chest and knocked through the plate glass window behind him.

Adrenaline sparked through the Boy's nervous system, hitting his brain, slowing his perception of time for a moment and causing his mind to race. He hoped against hope that the bones were going to hold together and nothing had broken off. The texts had been clear on that, floating bone pieces could puncture organs. He wasn't one hundred percent clear on all of the organs or what they did, but he got that they were vital and that puncturing them was something that he couldn't deal with in his cupboard.

But as he analyzed his pain, he felt something new. Something not-pain. A tingle raced through him, like a deep itch or when Dudley discovered what the wires behind the outlets in the wall did to a sleeping Boy.

The itch, the tingle, the whatever it was moved through his chest, and unless the Boy was mistaking the feeling of broken bones (it was possible, he had never broken a rib before) it sealed the breaks he thought he felt. His mind flashed through confusion and a hint of joy! Wrapping up broken ribs was described as painful and debilitating. The boy would be expected to break in all of their new toys over the next few days, and the damage he expected from his cousin's strike would have made it agony close to even his breaking point.

Then he hit the window behind him and not even the adrenaline in his system was enough to keep him conscious. The plate glass window of course did what any window would do under the kind of stress a flying nine year old would impart. It broke into sharp chunks and flew everywhere. As he passed by the shards cascaded over him, ripping the Boy's hand-me-downs and skin with equal ease.

Larger sections of glass fell on the boy as he passed through the threshold of the window proper, causing massive damage to parts of his head and face, and effectively shredding the oh-so-distinctive mark on his forehead. His upper body was also not spared the wrath the glass, and while his shirt soaked up most of the damage, it finally took enough abuse to give up the ghost entirely, effectively baring him to the waist.

The Boy passed completely through the window, and with terrible accuracy hit a girl on the other side of the window. The girl was young, also nine years old in fact, and had strawberry-blonde hair (leaning more towards the strawberry than the blonde) down to her elbows, a cute button nose, and brown eyes. She took the impact of a flying nine year old like a champ, but no one could be hit by something the weighed just as much as they did like that and remain standing. The boy was fortunately enough positioned to shield the young girl from the minor hailstorm of glass that accompanied him.

As the glass settled, the girl could be heard whimpering beneath the Boy. There was an instant of calm, like the silence between thunderclaps in the middle of a storm. Dudley had a victorious expression on his face. Petunia was looking at the window and was mid-haggle with the salesman over the very pan her son had used on her nephew, poorly concealing a vindictive smirk. Vernon stood behind her facing the window, not even bothering to conceal his expression of dark satisfaction.

But for the first time in the Boy's life, despite the power they held over him, they weren't the important ones in this scenario. On the Boy's side of the glass stood a stern and imposing woman. Steel grey hair and dark blue eyes accented her expression of concern and anger. Her Susan, her only living relative in this world, had been hurt, a situation that would be explained if she had anything to do with it, and Amelia Susan Bones was a woman who would not be denied. The matter of another small and wounded child only made her more intent on her duty.

The silent instant between moments passed, and life resumed. Amelia's wand appeared in her hand and she tapped it to her old auror's badge (she had never been more glad that she refused to relinquish it when she was appointed head of the DMLE). She pushed a bit of magic through to the badge, and with back-up thus summoned she turned her full attention to the situation in front of her.

Years of being on the front line against some of the foulest wizard's to grace the Queen's shores gave her the ability to pick up the essence of a scene in an instant. She didn't miss the expressions on the aggressor's parent's faces, and she didn't miss the joy on the suspect's (her mind having made the distinction automatically) face. Her eyes flicked down to the victim who covered her niece. His shirt was in tatters, exposing a heavily scarred chest.

Amelia's mind was halfway through the motions for a silent _repairo_ before the instinct guiding it short circuited and went back to the boy's chest. The spell fizzled as her attention turned from the spell to the track marks of pain covering his body. Short precise cuts that she idly attributed to a cutting curse or knife work marred the child's left side. Scars that lacked the same neat precision covered his abs and went along to his right. These looked more like punctures than slices, the back of her mind fit thrown objects of blast shrapnel to the pattern as her gaze moved to his overall state. The child's ribs appeared intact (her mind calculating the force of the blow and assigning accidental magic as the cause) as did the rest of his bones. The problem was more that all of his bones were visible under a very middling sheet of muscles. Add in the fact that the boy was clearly as old as her Susan but much smaller and the already whining alarm bells in the back of her head began screaming as her experience supplied malnutrition as the cause.

The boy had an unruly tangle of the blackest hair she had ever seen, and his eyes were a vivid green. From his glasses north was just one massive wound, shards of glass still visible in his skin.

She sighed and closed her eyes to get a moment of calm. This was now a child abuse case, not just an accident that she was mildly over-reacting to. The part of her that hated criminals cheered at seeing unbroken ribs, even as it cried foul from being able count each of them. Only accidental magic could have kept them whole, which brought the monsters responsible for the boy's state squarely into her jurisdiction.

Amelia completed her instinctive _repairo_ at the glass window, sending all of the shards back into their original places in the window and doing double duty by removing the pieces embedded in the boy and his clothes. The glass pulled from the small boy's head joined in with the rest of the window, embedding a reddish tint to its section.

Now the head of the Department of Magical Law enforcement was literally seeing red.

Telltale pops from a group of three aurors and a master obliviator saw Amelia gently but quickly removing the unconscious boy from her niece. She spared the boy a whispered _episkey_ for his forehead, before ensuring her Susan was okay. A moment's commands saw the boy's evident abusers rounded up, an entire city block's worth of non-magicals missing about fifteen minutes of their afternoon, and two injured kids popped over to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

* * *

The Boy regained consciousness in an instant. In the past, a slow transition from sleep or unconsciousness to wakefulness had cost him. He did his best to look like he was still asleep and listened in around him, Dudley knew where he slept after all.

"…and scarring that wouldn't look out of place on an auror," _auror_ , he thought, turning the unfamiliar word around in his head as the voice next to his bed continued, "and he has all of the classic signs of malnutrition. You were right about the accidental magic too," _Magic? I wasn't hurt enough to hallucinate, haven't in a long time, what is this?_ , "It looks strongly like the only thing holding him up for the last few years at least has been his magic. I wouldn't be surprised if he has never done any significant accidental magic before, his core has been constantly draining just to keep him up and walking around."

A new voice spoke up from his left, it had a definite edge to it, "I don't care what happens Andi, this boy will only see those _people_ again over my dead body."

"He's Nymphadora's age, Amy you can get in line."

The Boy relaxed at that. They had no reason to lie to him while he was asleep. Tension he wasn't aware of carrying melted off of him. He might be free of the Dursleys. Stiffness fleeing his joints caused his to relax just a bit into the amazing mattress behind him, a movement which caught the attention of his attendants.

"Seems like he's woken up. If you can, please sit up," came the voice of the Andi person to his right.

He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in some kind of sterile smelling white place. Curtains penned him and the people near him into a roughly ten by ten area, the air smelled a bit like the bleach Petunia made him use, and it was filled with the sounds of quiet hustling and bustling. It was a rather telling statement that with what he had been through he had never seen a hospital and so couldn't recognize one.

To his left was a woman who projected authority with more force than any police officer, store manager, or librarian the Boy had ever seen. Beside her was a young girl, and on his right what looked like a nurse or something with the most piercing violet eyes he had ever seen.

He moved to a sitting position, bracing himself for the pain from the large bruise on his chest, and when he didn't feel any such pain amazement was plain on his face. Once in a more vertical position he pulled at the top of the white gown thing he found himself in and looked down at his chest. It looked better than it had ever been, even before he got knocked through a window. The scars from Dudley throwing rocks at him and Piers Polkiss' flick knife looked like they had been healed for years, and not the month and a half it had really been.

"Why am I wearing a different set of clothes?" he croaked, and then as his mind followed that line of reasoning to it's end he whispered, "Oh god, you saw me, didn't you?"

Amelia saw the arc of his expression. First wonder at how he wasn't in pain any more, and moments later the brutal crash when he realized they had seen his scars. The mother in her could do nothing less than move to his side and draw him into a hug. He was stiff in her arms, but then she spoke.

"It will be okay. You're safe now. No more scars. And you will never see those people again. I swear on my life, you will never see them again."

The Boy didn't soften, but after a moment returned the hug awkwardly. Amelia could only guess, perhaps it was a lack of experience, or even a lack of trust, but she was encouraged by the quiet response.

"Thank you."

* * *

The people in the sterile place, and the Boy soon learned that it was in fact a hospital, had begun asking him a hundred question a minute practically from the moment that Amelia released him. It was all about his treatment, his diet, the story behind this scar or another. They seemed pretty genuine, and tricks weren't really what the relatives did. In fact their anger at the relatives was the most real emotion he saw on most of them. So he cooperated.

Two questions provoked the strongest reaction from them though. The first was also the first question they had asked period. It was simple, but the insight it gave the hospital staff and aurors into the Boy's life was unparalleled.

The question was elegant in its simplicity, "What is your name?"

The boy looked around the room, weighing the expression on faces. The nurses, the Amy lady, the Andi lady, the pair of people in weird clothes that asked the question, "I'm not sure. It starts with an 'H', I saw it on a paper once for school. They didn't have some kind of information the school wanted about me though, so I never ended up going. They call me 'Boy', but I've read enough to know that isn't a real name people have."

Andi and Amelia both stiffened. They shared some kind of inscrutable look at that particular tidbit of information, and without responding each left the room. The Boy was left in the room with the others. The healer lady with the medicine had her eyes on a watch, but she seemed to be holding it really hard. A man in plain white robes, and a man in a red cloak stood near the door, each looking just really… sad. The Boy saw it all and in particular noticed as the young girl that had followed Amy in sidled up to the bed and sat next to it.

"I'm sorry you don't have a name. My name is Susan, The lady with the grey hair is my aunty. Aunty Amelia. She brought me in so you could have someone not old to talk to. If all you know of your name is 'H', can I call you H?"

He liked her in an instant. She was earnest and she was nice. Kids like her were the reason for half of the trouble he got himself into. He couldn't stand to see them be bullied, but the same sort of niceness that he liked was exactly what made Dudley and his gang attack.

"I… I guess that'd be okay. I never really thought about names, it's never been important. It's always just been something other people had. Yeah... Yeah," the newly christened H looked up and met the girl's eyes, "Call me H."

Susan cracked a massive smile and held out her hand, "Pleased to meet you, H. I'm Susan."

A smile formed slowly on his face in response, H moved and returned the gesture, shaking her hand with a smile and a comic sense of false gravity.

The second question that had provoked a huge reaction from the hospital people had come much later, and actually had been asked by Susan.

She was sitting on a chair next to his bed and on a whim touched H's mass of hair.

"H, when was the last time you had a haircut?"

Amelia and Andi heard the question despite their conversation, and both looked like this was another of the causal questions they didn't want the answer to. An intern that had been taking notes in the back of the room gave a tired sigh. Evidence against his relatives had been stacking up all day, but that didn't make each piece of it any less troubling.

H sat for a full minute in silence, eyes scrunched up into a nine year old's adorable 'I'm thinking' pose.

"I… I think I had one when I was four? It was a long time ago. I'm not really sure, why?"

Most in the room looked shocked, but H could tell this was a different shock than when they had asked him if he had ever seen a 'doctor' before or where he slept.

Andi broke in with, "H, we've been keeping it a little below board, but I'm sure you have heard a few mentions of magic, haven't you?"

"I sort of thought I misheard that."

"No," Andi said, "You weren't hearing wrong. We wanted to break it to you gently, but this requires an explanation. Magic is real, H. Here, watch."

From the huge sleeves of the strange white robes she was wearing, Andi pulled out a small perfectly straight piece of wood. She waved it, and the blanket that was laying on top of H's legs shrank, pulled in on itself, and transformed into a small and beautiful black kitten.

H gasped audibly, and stuck a small quivering hand in front of the kitten. The small black cat sniffed his hand gently, and deciding he wasn't a threat, followed the hand to its source, flopping down in H's lap. H tickled and pet the kitten gently, his ministrations soon resulting in a surprisingly deep purr.

"H, are you sure you haven't had a haircut since you were five, you've never cut your own hair, nothing like that?"

H's attention was focused completely on the purring lump of fur, so his response was somewhat absent-minded, "Nope. I always thought hair didn't grow. _They_ left sometimes talking about haircuts, and they came back with different hair. It was shorter, but I always thought it was all wigs like I saw once on the telly."

H looked up and met her eyes, "Should it grow? Petunia said she would cut it once , and shaved me entirely bald 'cause she said she didn't like my hair. I hated it, but the next day all of it was back. Maybe I made it grow. I could try again," H's voice and manner was bright and cheery, "Let me try!"

H closed his eyes and his whole face scrunched in concentration. His hair immediately grew until it was about halfway down to the kitten still playing in his lap. He opened his eyes again.

"Is this good?" taking a hand from the cat he pushed a few locks out of his eyes and blew ineffectually at it, "I think I liked it shorter."

The intern in the back of the room fell out of his chair in a dead faint.

* * *

Four days later, H laid back in the most comfortable bed he had ever even heard of. The witches and wizards at the hospital had taken a number of small samples of his blood; a dozen had run their wands over him in so many patterns that he couldn't even begin to distinguish between them. He drank, by his count, twenty seven different kinds of potions, some several times a day. From what the healers called muscle stimulants to what they said would reveal who his parents were.

According to them that last kind failed to give any kind of results, so H still didn't know who his parents were. For the first time in his life though, that didn't feel like a big deal. Amelia Bones had adopted him somewhere along the line during those days, and H could honestly say he had never been happier.

He was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he was possessed by the wisdom he had read in the diary of a soldier from World War I. You never turn down food, because you can't be sure when your next meal will be, and you never turn down an hour's sleep, because you never know when you'll need it. H was going to take all the comfort and affection he could, and let tomorrow worry about itself for a little while.

His whole life he had to fight and bleed for anything remotely good to happen. No teacher or janitor or policeman, anyone really, had ever listened to him. No one had ever helped him. Now he had a nice sister, he found out he was a wizard of all things, he found out he was a shape changer thing, and he had a full name. He was H Bones.

Amelia promised him that he would be safe, and H believed she meant it. He was still going to memorize the exits and all the hiding places he could find. He already had a small stash of small pieces of cloth for bandages and a few Jacob's cream crackers hidden underneath his mattress. It had never _once_ hurt him to be prepared.


	3. Settling in

Chapter Two: Settling in

* * *

Amelia was confused. She was unused to being confused, and in point of fact did not appreciate the feeling. The fact that the reasons for her confusion were a family of child abusing thugs didn't improve her mood in the slightest.

Vernon and Petunia Dursley's minds were blank of anything relating to her new charge.

Literally blank, like something a first year obliviator would leave behind.

It was like there were seriously old-school family blood wards around the boy or something. Since he had been brought in to St. Mungos and exposed to magic, the two non-magical's knowledge of anything related to him had been fading. Just a few hours after the fact when she found out H didn't know his own name she had dispatched an auror to find out what it was from the only possible source just to hear back they genuinely didn't know.

Veritaserum hadn't been able to get anything from the pair or their son. They just no longer knew the boy's name, or even what he looked like. It was clear they meant him harm though, which is why Amelia came back to the idea of the blood wards. Only those had the power to do something like remove knowledge from a mind without physical proximity or evidence of any magical influence.

H must have been a magical orphan, but why in the nine hells had he been left with a family of magic haters? The act of casting wards in that vein had been illegal long before Amelia's own birth, and as the ministry wasn't keen on wards that even they couldn't touch if the situation required, it was one of the law fairly rigorously enforced on both side of the proverbial aisle. Only the _old_ families had access to the kind of blood wards that could do what was before her, but none of those families had reported anyone missing for years. The kid was a metamorph too, and any old family would kill for someone with that kind of power.

H was hers now though. Nothing would hurt that boy again as long as she drew breath, she had promised herself and him. But she needed to get him to Gringotts for an inheritance ritual. They'd find out where he was really from, mores the pity that Goblins refused to work on anyone less than eleven years old.

The wizarding community was a very small world. Amelia, first as an auror, then as head of the DMLE, had met probably most of the population at one point or another. H looked a lot like good old James Potter, back from her squad during the Blood War. The resemblance as of two weeks ago was uncanny, but there were at least three serious reasons why she was discarding it out of hand.

The boy was a metamorph who never had any instruction or recognition of his abilities. He looked kind of like what James would have looked like at that age, but H was at the stage where he was starting to mimic by sight, his features changing slightly when new people entered the room and when he was excited or scared, his hair alone was now 'permanently' a more reddish color which she suspected was based off Susan. On the topic of which, he had been reading a lot of Susie's 'Boy-Who-Lived' books with her, so at this stage the Potter connection was more than likely unrelated.

Then there was the fact that there was no way in the nine hells that the savior of the wizarding world, Harry _Bloody_ Potter, would have been left with a set of abusive good for nothings. Magical or non-magical had nothing to do with it, Amelia often liaised with Her Majesty's government and knew many non-magicals to be fine upstanding folks. That H was left with these monsters was evil enough, heads would literally roll and the people would demand blood, if it turned out their savior had been so abandoned.

Of course, the only thing that _everyone_ knew marked their savior, the scar, was also absent on the boy. When H had gone through that window a lot of glass had ended up in his forehead, so it was tough to tell if he had it in the first place. The thing was, he had enough scars on him to prove he couldn't manipulate that part of his body yet. Even if the lightning bolt scar was there, H probably couldn't separate it from the scars he got from the glass. He couldn't remember having a lightning bolt scar, so he was almost definitely not James' son, but who the devil was he then?

* * *

Time passed far too quickly for H's taste in the Ossuary (what the Bones' called their house, H thought it was clever). Amelia let H loose in her family's library with strict instructions to avoid the section of darker magic texts at the back. He spent a lot of time in there, most of which was interrupted by his new sister coming in and dragging him to the outside world.

For the first month there, he had Dursley flashbacks almost every night. Amelia kept waking up in the morning for work and finding him in the small kitchen off the informal dining room that they typically ate out of, usually with his eyes half closed and with a finished stack of pancakes on a plate next to the stove. She had to admit he was a great cook, but it took her the whole month to get him to not wake up before dawn and start cooking.

Susan spent her time brute forcing H into learning how to fly on the training brooms her aunt left them, and the pair spent a number of hours flying low and slow over the modest grounds surrounding the manor.

H was introduced to Susan's friend Hannah Abbot who lived nearby, and the freshly formed trio spent a lot of time showing their newest member all of the best spots to see a fish or catch a niffler on the grounds (And boy had Amelia been mad when she found them coaxing one into the house with Great Aunt Seraphina's good silver tea set). H found himself more often than not in a tree during a game of hide and seek, or splashing with the girls in a small creek that passed through the edge between the Abbot's land and the Bones'.

During the week Amelia was gone for most of the day and occasionally during the weekend as well. Her job was strenuous, Susan explained, so it left the kids alone with the elves a lot of the time. The elves that the Bones owned were a half dozen of the quietest people H had ever met. They tolerated him making breakfast sometimes, and conversation with them brought the young boy to the conclusion that he had functionally been one of them for a long time. He was quickly fast friends with the group.

Four days a week H spent a few hours with a mind healer in the evening, always under Amelia's watchful eye. The healer (a nice woman named Amanda Octeus) used what she called a small, tightly controlled version of legilimency. She entered his mind (magic still confused the hell out of H, but he was getting used to not understanding) and gently reviewed a lot of the memories from his time with the Dursleys.

It was painful for H, but he had dealt with it all then, and he could do it again. It wasn't like the telly, or like watching a painting, he felt everything all over again as real as it had been the first time. It was a matter of honor for him, he was strong and had paid a lot for that stubbornness. Healer Octeus was keen to make him realize it wasn't his fault, that he didn't deserve what happened to him, and that he could move past it. The trouble was, H knew that. H was aware. What made him who he was, was that he knew he hadn't deserved what he got, but he endured despite it. He knew, and he too it a step further by making himself a lightning rod for the hate in the family so that the others wouldn't be. Healer Octeus didn't seem to know what exactly to make of it, but Amelia seemed pleased for some reason, so H decided he was pleased as well.

The end of H's second month saw the first big change to the routine of play, reading, and healing he, Susan, and Hannah had. Andi (Healer Andromeda Tonks, H had learned at St. Mungos) came over and brought her daughter, Nymphadora 'I-will-stab-you-if-you-use-my-first-name' Tonks.

Nymphadora was an unpredictable and fun person. Her apocalyptic rage at anyone laughing at her name was almost as fun to watch as it was to incite, and she played a mean game of hide and seek.

She was the same age as H, Susan, and Hannah, and she enjoyed their habit of flying around the grounds as much as they did, being familiar with the area already. Before H came into their lives she had been a regular visitor, only stopping so Amelia and Susan could get H acquainted with a normal day-to-day life at the Ossuary. They thought Nymphadora, or Nym as she _very_ grudgingly preferred, might disrupt that life because she was also a shape changer, another metamorphmagus.

Immediately as they met H and Nym validated the reason behind their being separated by dropping everything they were doing and comparing what they could do with their bodies. H had gotten really good at changing his hair. From the first time he had done it in the hospital he had been messing with the power, so he ran through a dozen colors while changing through seven or eight styles from a mohawk to waist length luxurious locks.

Nym showed her competitive streak at his challenge. As they stood in front of their parents, she grew herself an extra thirty centimeters, then shrunk down thirty centimeters from her original height. Rolling up the long sleeves of her robes, she flexed her arm and with a moment's concentration made her bicep muscle visibly expand to double its former size.

H couldn't help his huge grin. He hadn't figured out bones yet, so he couldn't grow like she could, but muscles he could do. Robes were still new to him, so he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. H flexed like a bodybuilder and grew the muscles all along his shoulders and arms. He even expanded the muscles in his back and chest out until the shirt he was wearing was tight enough to show the defining edges of his changes to his own body.

Susan and Hannah were staring open mouthed, while the adults were chuckling at the display. Nym watched him as he made his latest changes without a second's hesitation, a slightly jealous but thoroughly amused smile on her face.

"You win this time."

A round of laughter later, they added a very familiar fourth to their group.

* * *

Time passed and life continued getting better for the Tonks', the Bones' and the heiress to the Abbot family name. The Abbots were more traditional purebloods and never had been close to the much more progressive Bones' to their daughter's chagrin.

The kids spent their days playing, and at the almost annoying insistence of H, messing about with magic. For H the library had been his refuge from the horrors of Dudley and the violence of his friends. Susan, Hannah, and Nym complained but allowed it. Andi had taken them aside on a few occasions and asked that they give H a little space and time, if he felt comfortable around books they were instructed to let him do it a bit every day. The girls were hardly going to complain too hard in the face of that.

They celebrated the high holidays of the magical world, and explored the neighborhoods around each of their homes. To their parent's joy, they toured the Ministry and St. Mungos to show H their world. They sat through a wizengamot session, and visited a magical creature preserve. Under Amelia's authority, they even managed a broom tour of the Isle of Drear to see the terrifying and illusive Quintapeds.

Nym and H spent hours and hours competing with each other to change their bodies in more and more impressive ways. Susan and Hannah spent a lot of time in front of the pair. Offering criticisms of various changes and generally playing at being snobby fashion critics. Nym spent a lot of time working on a rather realistic pig nose, while H favored a full sized duck bill (likely because his competition couldn't quite manage it). Daily competition advanced their abilities to an amazing extreme, both of them going to more and more outrageous changes in an effort to get the upper hand.

Amelia was supportive, but the real interest came from Andromeda, who came home one day to find three trouble makers placing her daughter in a giant pot and filling the area around her with soil because she managed to change her feet into a distiurbingly accurate root system.

There was no way to stop the kids, so she felt compelled to ensure they at least would not kill themselves while home and without adult supervision. With that, she delved into centuries of old St. Mungos records for tales and explanations of the abilities and lives of other metamorphs. The four friends (Susan and Hannah both having soaked up a treasure trove of information simply by diffusion from the two shape changers) over H's first year as a Bones became knowledgeable about anatomy for human and other species to an absurd extent. The information they uncovered helped the burgeoning metamorphmagi learn about making safe changes to their biology. Their quest for knowledge (Susan was amused and happy to help her brother, Hannah was considering a career as a healer eventually) even brought them out to the non-magical world.

The friends became a family, and their love and support went a long way to healing some of the wounds H still had from the first nine years of his life.


	4. Wherein Luck Rears Its Head

Chapter Three: Wherein Luck Rears Its Head

* * *

The family's peace, tragically just as every other peace throughout history, was eventually broken, and in following a certain terrible trend it occurred on October 31st, 1990.

All Hallows Eve.

On this day the four kids were with Amelia in the auror department. They had ventured into the territory of the red-robed peacekeepers for what their non-magical counterparts would call a ride-along.

The aurors traditionally did this for a number of firstborn witches and wizards every year, as well as some of the more worldly purebloods. A pair of aurors took a group of kids along on a regular foot patrol around Diagon Alley and explained the intricacies of their jobs to them. Sometimes they even had a 'criminal' from the depths of Knockturn Alley come by and 'steal' a purse so they could give the kids a bit of excitement. The whole operation was something the department ran a few dozen times a year, and was just a normal function.

Today though the stalwart members of the auror corps had an unwitting Harry Potter with them, a fact that naturally would come to complicate their routine.

Senior Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt and Auror Hawkes Hawlish were politely volunteered by their boss to be the aurors on the ride along patrol that day. H, Susan, Hannah, and Nym were the only kids taking the tour that day, and the plan for the patrol was simple.

Shacklebolt and Hawlish were going to lead them down Practic Alley (the section of the wizarding area dedicated entirely to clothes which ran parallel to Diagon), and as they reached the end they would turn onto Form (the section specializing in the bigger and more dangerous creatures), follow it to Diagon Alley proper, then head back to the ministry building. Straightforward, and the work of forty-five minutes, or an hour tops. These kids had seen the purse cutter routine before, so there wouldn't be any bells or whistles on this one. It was all just a favor to Amelia who needed the kids tied up for an hour so she could finish her parchment-work for the night before everyone headed home to spend the holiday with family.

The patrol started, and H was resigned to amused silence as the three witches went wild over the fashions and dresses for sale all over Practic Alley. The path down the middle of the alley was crowded in on all sides by brilliantly colored fabrics and moving mannequins wearing the creations of a hundred seamstresses. Small charmed lines were tied across the alley far above head height, and fabrics of the richest scarlet, the purest white, and the most brilliant blue hung down from them. There were emeralds that Nym said reminded her of H's eyes, causing H to blush, and there were golds that H compared to Hannah's hair, making her blush.

As the girls chattered excitedly about everything around them, H stood between the aurors, and shared an occasional glance with each of them, as if to say, "Women, am I right?"

Shacklebolt and Hawlish both accepted his looks with massive grins. He had no idea.

They eventually reached the end of the alley, the two aurors not having seen anything of any professional interest but both having noted a few things they would return for in the coming days before Yule. The group made the turn on to Form Alley, and H's eyes lit up.

Form Alley was known in the ministry affectionately as the actual offices of the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures. It was the only place on British soil where one could legally buy or trade dragon eggs, and in the right part of the alley one could purchase the services of a sphinx, or even bargain for the protection of a werewolf bodyguard. The alley saw massive amounts of gold and goods exchanged daily, and consequently was only marginally better than Knockturn in terms of the legitimacy of its businesses.

The store fronts were alternately covered in cages, or entirely unmarked, as if anyone who wanted their services would already know exactly what and where they were.

The turn onto the alley was an assault on the senses. Uncleansed or partially cleaned animals and cages filled the air with their unfortunate scents, right alongside the calls of a thousand different owls, hippogriffs, kneazles, and the occasional roar of what sounded a lot like a non-magical lion.

Here the auror pair straightened up and drew their wands from their respective holsters, keeping them in hand but casually hidden inside the large charmed sleeves of their robes. There hadn't been anything untoward reported in the alley for over a month, otherwise they would never had brought children there but in a place like this, and with the department head's only living relative, it paid to be over cautious.

About a quarter of the way down the alley, near where it curved around a tank of grindylow and the crowd of Goblins bidding on them, something changed. It was _very_ subtle, hovering just on the edge of the group's perception, but that ten meter stretch was imperceptibly and unmistakably different than all of the alley around it.

The air hung heavier around all of their necks. Before, the amount of kneazle dung being traded was just another unpleasant note in the air, but now it rang sharp and sour in their nostrils. The sun seemed lower, despite the hour, and the alley seemed a long longer than it had a few seconds before. For an instant Hannah clutched a little painfully at Susan's arm, because fort an instant she got the impression that she might never leave. H felt the wrongness in the air acutely, and through a crack in a window saw something he had never seen before, and as he recognized it, he hoped to never see it again. For H it felt suddenly like the years he had spent with his relatives before Amelia had saved him, it haunted him.

He had eye full of unshed tears as he said, "Mr. Shacklebolt, that's not legal, right? Is it sir? Please tell me no." H's voice cracked, and plead with the veteran for the answer he was looking for.

The large dark skinned auror had stopped and held an arm out to stop his partner just a step after H spoke. He had noticed the same feelings they had all felt, and had been close to casting his patronus preemptively, but with the boy's pointing finger he identified the feeling immediately. The number of people in the entire world who had been present to see a phoenix cry in sorrow numbered only in the dozens, and each of them though would say the same thing: it was an experience they would never forget as long as they lived, and more importantly, one they never wanted to repeat.

Kingsley had been present at the end of the war against Grindlewald. He had been only a boy then, having signed up under an assumed name while just a bit too young to actually be enlisted in the magical corps that had gone to challenge the insane dark wizard. He had seen the phoenix Fawkes cry over the broken body of Albus Dumbledore. He knew that noise, muffled as it was.

Shacklebolt murmured, almost below the level the rest of the group could hear at, "No..."

Shacklebolt hurried to the window he glimpsed the horrifying sight through, and the large auror immediately vanished the glass, exposing the revolting darkness of the building to the light.

Inside what appeared to be a dusty and long abandoned basement, a group of five wizards crowded around a runic circle that contained a phoenix. The circle glowed and crackled, throwing black and dark purple flecks of magic into the air around its edges. The phoenix inside the circle was bound to the ground by hideous lashes of magic the same color as the magic surrounding it. Its wings were broken, bending the wrong way and where they connected with the too still body of the bird there was dried and caked blood clinging to the feathers.

The men around it were manipulating glinting crystal vials inside the circle, collecting the tears streaming down the beak of the once proud avian legend. One had his eyes tightly closed and was chanting, while visibly channeling power into the circle that was binding the bird to the ground.

From where the kids and aurors were viewing from the street, a piteous and terrible keening could be heard. Shacklebolt and Hawlish both recognized the signs of a silencing charm that had degraded around the frame of the vanished window.

Shacklebolt closed his eyes and visibly gulped. He put a hand on the shoulder of the man at his side, and jumped through the window to the basement floor to join battle with the monsters who dared to perform such heinous acts on a physical manifestation of the light.

Hawlish roughly grabbed H and Nym who were nearest him and spoke in a quiet but authoritative tone to the kids, "We'll stop this. We have to stop this. But this is dangerous. Someone who could do this to a phoenix," a crash announced that Kingsley had begun his attack, "could do anything. You all stay here, and you stay out of the way, you hear me?"

Hawlish had heard the sounds of battle coming from the window, and couldn't hold back any longer. Without a further glance at the kids still standing dumbfounded at the window on the street, he too jumped down to support his partner.

Five on two are pretty rough odds no matter how you cut it, Kingsley Shacklebolt, or as he was known around the water cooler, Shack, was no slouch though. He was easily qualified to be a master auror, the combat he saw in World War II as well as his years of experience in the Blood War and rounding up criminals since then had honed a killing instinct in the man that few could match. Mad-eye Moody himself could only manage to win six of ten duels against him. Auror Hawlish, known to his friends as Hawk, wasn't nearly as qualified, but knew his business nonetheless. The two men had been partners for half a decade, and in that time had found their rhythm in combat.

Hawlish went defensive, casting angled _protego_ s around his partner at roughly sixty degree intervals. Shack's favored style of combat was a very static one, he stood in place deflecting or absorbing spells as needed to give himself the time and focus for longwinded and overpowered curses. His opening salvo of a chain of stunning, binding, and strong piercing spells took out the chanter immediately.

As the chanting dropped and the magic stopped flowing into the binding circle, the other four men took immediate notice and threw up their own shields just before they could be hit by Shack's stronger second burst of spell fire. Hawlish jumped in just in time with his shielding, neatly deflecting the bright yellow and sickly brown of the dark wizards' answering shots.

With the opening gambit played, the battle began in earnest.

Spells flew everywhere around the basement, giving it the brief and terrifying appearance of a laser lightshow. Three supports to the building above them were sliced through by an errant flame whip, Hawlish extinguished it with a muttered counter curse centimeters from Kingsley's knees. An answering _reducto_ from the singed auror knocked a wizard arse over teakettle , and a follow up _reducto_ got deflected by a comrade back and down, blowing a massive hole in the ground and returning shards of paving stone to sender, cutting three narrow but bloody swathes across Hawlish's left cheek. A lucky return piercer from Hawlish hit one of the phoenix-poachers in the neck, killing him instantly, and sending the three remaining men into a rage.

Shack and Hawlish were pushed away from the standing shields and back almost to the wall they had come in over. Outside H had the three girls lying flat on the ground across the alley and out of sight of the window. He had learned a number of lessons about line of sight and flying objects when Dudley received his first slingshot, and he applied this knowledge to keeping his friends safe.

Back inside the building, Shack was barely holding off the group of wizards as Hawlish frantically cast and recast shields in front of the both of them. Both aurors thought things looked exceptionally bleak, but neither regretted their choice. Dying in defense of one of the noblest forms of life in the world was an excellent way to go, and in fighting the good fight they could each have done a lot worse.

Behind the combat the phoenix that had been tortured to the very edge of its limit returned to consciousness. It had been subject to the darkest rituals, each designed to bind it, force it to cry life giving tears, and to imbue those tears with the same energy that made it nigh-on immortal. The foul magic that had been applied drew energy enough to power three rebirth cycles for every tear, and after hours of being drained it was dying a death it didn't have the power to deny.

A phoenix was a physical manifestation of light, of cleansing fire, of life, of charity, and of good. They healed the sick and ministered to the dying. Their voice could inspire the righteous and condemn the unworthy, and when two men jumped down into a basement filled with hellish magic to recuse one's life, it naturally chose to take some of the last energy it had and funnel it into the best support it could render. A final song from the beak of an immortal bird.

Shacklebolt and Hawlish were near dropping from exhaustion. In order to bind a phoenix you had to be rather gifted magically, and the men they fought showed it. It was taking every ounce of skill both had to fend off the brute force of their foes, but everything changed as the phoenix sang. They each felt the power of the phoenix song wash over them, adding it's power to their own.

The three dark men who had gone so far in their evil as to assault and harm a phoenix collapsed at the sound coming from the bird. To their bodies, each steeped in dark magic, it was worse than the call of a banshee, and was more effective than any _stupefy_. The three lay on the ground, blood flowing freely from their ears, eyes and noses.

Outside H heard the last call of the firebird and, surprisingly, acted. The song was in aid of the poor bird's rescuers, but it was not for them, nor was it against the three who had harmed it so. The song was a message straight to the alert mind that had noticed it's suffering and begun the chain of events leading to its freedom.

H walked as if in a trance to the window, and dropped down to the basement floor. He walked calmly, looking to the world like a man subjected to a _confundus_ , passing by Shacklebolt and Hawlish who were engaged in re-stunning and tying up the dark wizards.

H walked to the body of the phoenix, and with unnatural steadiness picked up the phoenix. It was so still. So injured and very much in the last moments of its life, but despite it all it looked like the most beautiful thing in the world. Its feathers glinted like rubies in the half light of the basement, its black eyes still silently singing of strength and glory, even as it let go of its mortal coil.

The phoenix lifted its graceful neck, and nuzzled against H's cheek, it's touch burning away more terror and hurt from the boy's mind and soul. H gently scratched the fine feathers just above its eyes, and with a sigh the phoenix laid an egg in the boy's arms.

The room became warmer. The bloodied face of Hawlish, the sweating face of Shacklebolt, and the curious and slightly shadowed face of H all turned up into wistful grins. Then, as the basement filled with a sense of melancholy and satisfaction so strong it bore down on the three like a physical pressure, there was a great rushing heard as though from a great distance, and the phoenix died.

* * *

Amelia looked at mass of conjured chairs in front of her, and rather unfortunately, at the less useful in comparison people still filling them. Her office had to be hastily expanded as more and more experts poured in from a dozen of the ministry's more _exotic_ (read: pointless) departments. Everyone had an opinion that just _had_ to be heard, and if she didn't have a secret drawer in her desk hidden by a rune powered notice-me-not and filled to the brim with headache and wit-sharpening potions, she probably would have screamed. As it stood she continued to have to pinch the bridge of her nose and apply all the occlumency she knew to stop her anger from rising.

Her aurors, or rather Scrimgeour's aurors (why did she still have trouble making that distinction, she wondered) had reported back to the office over four hours ago. A medi-witch on staff had fixed them up in a moment. Shack got a pepper-up, Hawlish got a pain reliever, a quick _episkey_ and a pepper-up, and the kids all got a bar of chocolate.

It was when her H had to juggle the chocolate with a large ruby red egg that she realized what trouble had started.

The tale came out of the group in front of her slowly, and while short, oh what a tale it was. The depth of the dark magic necessary to actually restrain a phoenix boggled the mind. A group of men evil enough to actually do the thing was beyond belief. The discovery of a dozen liters of stolen and _potent_ phoenix tears went beyond anything she had the tools to deal with. If H hadn't seen the perversion of everything good and decent through that crack in the window, she honestly couldn't bring herself to think of how long that phoenix would have continued to suffer.

It had been over eleven _centuries_ since the last recorded death of a phoenix. Eleven. And one died after giving birth to an egg just four and a half hours ago. In the middle of her jurisdiction. If that weren't enough Ministry sensors were still picking up measurable amounts of the phoenix's song floating around, interfering with the trace network.

Instead of dealing with it she was stuck here having to listen to this group of sorry excuses for wizards all try to get control over the egg, and she had never been closer to using an unforgivable. So far the only people who were making sense to her, and not requesting the egg, were the folks from the Department of Mysteries. Even Lucius Malfoy was standing in the back of her office, with a smug expression on his face, of course, trying to use the Office of the Minister to get a hold of it.

Thankfully, it was all futile. British magical law was built on the bones of the laws set forth by Merlin, who had in turn based his code on the natural magical laws of the druid-stewards who had lived before him, and _they_ had based their traditions on those observed by the earth aspected creatures they worked with, the nymphs, dryads, giants, centaurs, and the like. The point of that chain spanning centuries of legal tradition was that a phoenix's gift could only ever belong to whom it was gifted.

No trades, no take-backs, no passing the buck, and most importantly no 'justifiable confiscation of powerful magical creatures and objects'.

The unspeakables were with her and the law was with her. The only person that could possibly try to overrule her was out of the country ministering over the International Confederation of Wizards, so no one could possibly interfere.

It looked like H was getting a familiar.

* * *

It took some time for the family to adjust and get back to normal.

The kids didn't read the paper (except the Quibbler, which hardly rated) so they missed the media storm around the egg and what had happened. They were kids though, so what they did pick up on was how much the two biggest adult influences in their lives were affected every morning when they read the paper and every evening when they came back from work. By mutual agreement, the called off all serious mischief making while the adults looked so stressed. It wouldn't due to be assigned some kind of real minder during the day, so instead they funneled that energy over into egg care and general research on phoenixes.

Amelia and Andi expected the girls to become little mother hens with the egg, and they expected H to be a little boy about it, that being their somewhat natural states after all. They were surprised to find that H took the responsibility of taking care of the phoenix egg more seriously than even them, only _very_ rarely being seen outside arm's reach of it.

It was hard for them to _not_ know how rare what they had was, a phoenix egg hadn't been seen on _Earth_ for longer than even Griselda Marshbanks had been alive. Madam Marshbanks had actually come by the Ossuary to ask after it the week after the event when they found out that little fact.

A hurried search of ministry archives as well as everything on the open market for information on taking care of a phoenix egg had turned up exactly nothing. H had even gone as far as sending a polite missive off to the esteemed Nicholas Flamel, only to be told that in nearly seven hundred years the old man had never come across care instructions for a phoenix egg, and in fact had only ever seen two. Though he did ask to be told when it hatched and had its first burning day. Amelia's inquiries in the department of mysteries hadn't turned up anything substantial either.

The Bones were worried they'd make a mistake, and H was the most nervous of all of them. He quickly developed a sixth sense for the egg though. Whenever someone got near the small cushion he had put it on to protect it, he was there. Always within reach of the egg, but just far enough away to make it clear that he was trying his ten year old best to not be conspicuous. Nearly two months passed in that manner, with the entire manor doing their level best to _not_ step on eggshells, until the 24th of December.

At 19:45 that evening, as H put on his pyjamas and made himself ready for bed and yule the next morning, the egg hatched.

It started with H, pyjama pants on and in the process of adding a flannel shirt to his ensemble, mid-conversation with Susan, Hannah, and Nym. The Tonks were at the Ossuary for the holiday, and Hannah had talked her parents into letting her spend the night.

They were talking about how ridiculous the non-magical idea of St. Nick was (clearly he was a fairy, duh) when H just stopped moving. He stopped so dead still that the girls thought he was messing with them and had actually begun poking him to ensure he was still alive. Then so suddenly no one could react, he was running full tilt through the halls of the manor, the elves shouting at him to be careful as they had just waxed the floors.

Amelia saw him running, and she later swore he was using some form of accidental magic to keep himself on the ground, because he moved like lightning through the house to the cushion next to the fireplace he had placed the egg on that morning.

In retrospect they should have suspected something, that day was the first he let pass without being in constant contact with his ovoid charge.

When he arrived in the room, the girls and adults both hot on his heels, he picked up the egg with love and care, and rolled it directly into the heart of the flames in the fireplace.

Andi and Hannah's faces both drained of blood and in a move that would have been funny in any other situation, identically fainted dead away. Nym walked up and smacked H in the back of the head, as Susan and Amelia both adopted identical expression of utter shock. He hadn't let another person touch the egg in days. It was his, he had said. It was his to take care of and he would do it. He insisted.

Then he had just rolled it straight into the heart of a fire that would cook the egg as surely as if he had cracked it over the large wok he occasionally made breakfast with.

Nym, eyes full of tears, beat her fists uselessly into H's shoulder, "You were taking care of it! How could you, what did you do! How could you?!"

The egg had grown on all of them while they had it. In the two months it had been with them, it was a pretty common sight to see the girls sitting with H reading wizarding stories about phoenixes to the egg. They hadn't named it (H warned off the girls before they could, despite their outspoken desire to do so), but they kept it with them when they had dinner, and H took it to his room when he slept every night.

For his part, H looked like a man possessed, his gaze was off in what could be best described as a thousand yard stare. Without moving his eyes from the heart of the fire, he folded Nym into his arms where she continued to hysterically sob. Behind him Hannah and Andi were still shocked half to death, and Susan and Amelia had disturbingly similar gob-smacked expressions.

Thirty seconds passed, the only sounds being the crackling of the fire and the slowing sobs of a visibly drooping Nymphadora Tonks.

Then, a small trilling filled the room, lightening the mood considerably. H removed his arms from around Nym, and walked around her and to the fire. The fire, which seemed to be the source of the trilling. H stood almost patiently at the edge of the fireplace, letting the melody continue, before leaning over and sticking his face and whole upper body directly into the flames.

Amelia was immediately shocked from her stupor, shouting, "H!" and racing to her son's side.

Her yell of his name became a wordless scream at the apparent suicidal behavior of the boy. In the second it took her to reach the fire though, H stood back up unharmed, revealing a small phoenix in his hands.

The boy wore a smile a mile wide, and hugged the bird to his chest. He walked calmly away from the fire, eyes never moving from the bird cradled in his arms forcing his mum to skid to a halt or run him over.

The tiny flaming avian in H's arms was the purest snow-white. It had flecks of black in its feathers, suspiciously like the coloring of a snowy owl. That wasn't the only difference from what a phoenix was supposed to look like though. All of the literature that the family had been going through agreed, phoenixes were red and gold firebirds, they had black eyes, and golden beaks and claws. The baby bird in H's arms had eyes that were as green as H's own, and its claws and beak were both black as night.

The phoenix in H's arms trilled and cooed, rubbing the boy with its beak.

* * *

In the days that followed, the girls in the house all made their peace with H's actions. Hannah and Andi were quick to forgive, being that they had been functionally unconscious for what Susan, Nym and Amelia all agreed was the worst of it. It also helped that the pair were woken to reality by the first song of a new born phoenix, held lovingly in the arms of a tender and smiling H.

Susan and Amelia were both still angry at H for not saying anything and just walking into fire. H attempted to defend himself, but learned quickly that emotion trumped logic every time. Thankfully for his sanity he applied that lesson immediately by hiding behind an adorable baby animal.

Nym, for her part, refused to address him directly, instead only talking to him through the medium of the newborn bird.

Yule celebrations were, understandably, greatly disturbed by the presence of the phoenix, H's performance also putting a rather large damper on the presentation of presents the next morning. It took him an hour struggling against five passionate and emotional women before he found an outlet for the outpouring of (ugh!) feelings in naming his new friend.

They determined that H's familiar was a lady (thankfully identified by the curvature of the beak and claws), and H insisted that they suggest names to her, letting her best reaction determine her name.

Susan opened with, "Merlin!"

The phoenix looked at her with amusement, and Hannah smacked her arm, "She's a girl dummy!" turning back to the wide eyed bird, "Maeve!"

The phoenix hid its head under its wing, prompting Nym to try, "Morgana!"

She received a glare in return, and the young bird looked to H who was laughing, "Okay guys, I think she wants you to stretch a little deeper than the three most used names in wizard-dom."

Andi had been looking down at the bird thoughtfully, "Danu, or Dana! The celtic mother goddess."

H's familiar tilted its head back and forth, as if weighing the names, then just shook its head.

"Gizmo!" Susan tried, only to recieve a look that asked 'Really?'

She didn't give up, "Sprout." The look didn't change.

"Ook?" This time the baby bird walked over and cuffed Susan's hand with her wing.

"Nikita"

"Naussica"

"Esmerelda"

"Violet"

"Éowyn"

"Nymphadora?" Nym tried, H's phoenix friend actually bit her at that. H laughed out loud at how his familiar was reacting to their attempts, receiving his own smack from Nym for his troubles.

The girls weren't done though, "Fiona!"

"River"

"Jade"

"Empress Anastasia"

H decided to throw in his own bad idea with, "Kid-Killer McGee!"

She bit him considerably harder than Nym at that one.

It went on for over an hour before H decided to put them out of their frustration and misery. Since his hatchling first called to him from the fire he placed her egg in, he had begiun to get a sense of her somewhere in the back of his mind. He did his best to touch that feeling as he idly picked through a history text he had picked from the library while even the adults around the table broke into 19th century Russian literature for inspiration.

Hannah had her head on the table, plainly having given up. Susan looked angry, and Nym had three welts on her fingers from further suggestions so bad that H's little bird felt no other response would work. Amelia and Andi looked amused, but were definitely beginning to show wear.

Finally H finished it.

"Hedwig"

She perked up immediately and with an ineffectual flap, tottered over to her human. A small warble escaped her beak as she rubbed her neck on H's fingers.

Thus was the phoenix named.


	5. Birds, Family, Minor Necromancy

Chapter Four: Birds, Family, Minor Necromancy

* * *

One of the defining aspects of children the world over is how quickly they adapt to new circumstances. They rebound quickly, it's a simple fact of their nature, and perhaps even human nature. We would far too easily, but if we do not die we scar up and move forward. Amelia and Andi took until February to get used to an actual phoenix sitting on H's shoulder. Susan, Hannah, Nym, and H were back to normal by January 10th.

The girls existed in a constant state of suspended disbelief, they were the kids who had grown up in a magical environment after all. H was very slowly getting used to magic, he still had a lot of questions about everything even after just over a year in a magic house, but H also had a rapidly growing mental connection to a physical manifestation of magic, so he muddled through somehow.

Amelia was initially fairly worried about H's ability to responsibly handle a pet, and when she broached the topic of her concerns with the lad, she found herself somewhat less than comforted.

"H, have you ever had a pet before?"

"Well I had a mouse I shared some of my food with and was sorta friends with back when I was in my old cupboard," as he responded his sunny expression clouded over, and the baby Hedwig clumsily fluttered over, her adorable awkwardness in getting to his lap comforting Harry.

Amelia found herself regretting her need to be a good parent, but followed through on the topic anyway.

"Well did you remember to always feed it, and make sure it had a nice clean place to sleep? Things like that?"

"I tried to. I kept pretty good care of it for a long time, until, well..."

"Until what H?"

"Well my cousin stepped on it one day and I think it maybe died, but I'm not sure."

Yep, these were the conversation she didn't really want to have, "I don't like reminding you of this stuff H, but your cousin weighed almost 100 kilos. He would have crushed a grim is he stepped on it, why did you say it maybe died?" Amelia asked with confusion clear in her voice.

"Well the little guy came back to me a couple days later. I was really sad about it for a while, then he showed up again in the little mouse hole he always slept in. He was really cold, and he was issing a lot of fur, but it was him! I think he came to see me again to say good bye, 'cause I never saw him again and there weren't mice around the house anymore after he said good-bye."

H definitely looked troubled at that, like he suspected something had been up, but before any significant brain power could be devoted to pulling that train of thought, Hedwig began nibbling on his fingers for more attention.

Amelia added up all the information she had, and made the executive level decision to stop asking questions there.

Great.

Accidental necromancy.

Of course her adopted son would have done accidental necromancy as a kid. She honestly could not help but recognize the description of what could only be the world's first dormouse inferi. It was like a parent replacing a dying pet with another that looked like the first, but taken to the extreme of an emotional and powerful young wizard stuck alone in a bloody closet. Amelia cursed the Dursleys again, not because it helped anything, but because in moment like this it made her feel better.

The kid's play grew, their games gaining a new level of complexity as a phoenix and her fire traveling became a new dimension to explore. H and Nym , under the careful supervision of Andi, and the not-so-careful but significantly more secret supervision of the others, tried applying all of the research they had done on phoenixes to try and morph into bird-like forms. Susan and Hannah, with Hedwig nestled between them, resumed their commentary and evaluation of the on-going self-transfiguration competition between H and Nym, with the phoenix adding color commentary in the form of songs that seemed to laugh and mock their efforts in equal measure. H did have a bit of an advantage though, feelings he got from Hedwig helped him refine his ability to grow feathers and change his muscles and bone.

Birthdays were celebrated, dinners at the most ancient and noble houses of Bones and Abbot were had, and adventures to London and Harrod's were embarked upon with the Tonks. The family did its best to be in both worlds, the kids thought it was great fun, while Amelia and Andi saw how much of an advantage they would have knowing of both. For Andi it was also a way to keep the kids, and Nym in particular in touch with the memory of her late husband Ted.

Time passed, and suddenly it was August.

* * *

Age verification spells could nail down a birthdate to plus or minus a month or spo. Perfect accuracy was possible, but it cost a lot of money and required one to interact with the Department of Mysteries Temporal Division, which was a lot like what Amelia understood non-magical dentistry without pain-killers to be like. The ones they had cast on H after finding out that they had no idea when he was born placed his upper limit as August 10th. So on August 10th Amelia took the day off of work and brought all of the kids to Gringotts to see H get an inheritance ritual. The plan was to hit Diagon Alley after and get all of the Hogwarts shopping out of the way in one go.

Despite all of the places they had seen and toured, none of the kids had been inside Gringotts before. Amelia was a very high ranked ministry official, so her visiting Gringotts had to be handled carefully. She was effectively a high ranking member of her government journeying to a foreign and potentially very hostile nation, so naturally the more… excitable… kids needed to be coached on proper responses to the Goblins as well as the basics of gobbledegook. A wrong move during a visit by her had the potential to move into a cross species incident, and she had no desire to start a war especially by proxy through her kids. Ministry regulations their casual racism managed to complicate yet another aspect of her life.

The five humans approached the massive white marble edifice of the bank, phoenix (now grown to what they understood to be roughly teenage-bird proportions) perched quietly on H's shoulder.

Now, to understand Goblin society the first thing one has to acknowledge is that they are a society of warriors and in order to meet with success in any interaction with them, this must be held in the forefront of one's mind. So when entering the stronghold of a potentially hostile group of fighters, the polite thing to do is to declare one's self to the outermost sentries before entering the fortress proper.

Two Goblins in full plate armor stood to either side of the entrance to the bank for this very purpose, both ignored by nearly every wizard as they walked directly by both of them without a second thought. A pair in the finest armor the Goblin nation could produce stood in such a pose twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year, as demanded by Gringott's martial pride and by treaty.

Amelia and the kids walked up the sentries, H shifted Hedwig to his arm, and they all delivered bows of respect to an unknown party, one of the four bows supplied by Amelia's formal ministry training. The Goblins looked on, brutally suppressing the surprise that any human magicals, or perhaps British human magicals, would pay them respect.

Amelia began formally, "Master Goblins, I am Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. I would like to check the accounts of the children with me, and to arrange for an inheritance ritual for the boy beside me," H bowed again, filled with uncertainty and nervousness in the face of a Goblin armed with an axe so sharp he couldn't help but be consumed by the suddenly important concern of whether or not he could regrow a limb, "I am with Susan Bones, Nymphadora Tonks, Hannah Abbot, and my adopted son H Bones."

The two Goblins looked at one another. Formal acknowledgment of entry was the most breached portion of the current treaties, most officials with the British government were too stupid or arrogant to actually abide by their solemnly sworn agreements to this behavior. It went without saying that the human's bows indicated the wrong action tense and in fact invited the guards to sniff them and reject their entry if them seemed unwashed. The point was instead that the list of ministry representatives that abided by the treaty now expanded to include this woman's young, nearly doubling the size of the list.

The phoenix hardly hurt their case as well.

The Goblin to the left of the entrance spoke with a voice that invoked gravel sliding down a hill, "Enter, witch, and seek the office of Master Rel in the hall to the immediate right of the entrance. He will meet your needs."

The five all responded with "Thank you master Goblin" in gobbledegook, Amelia out of genuine thanks, a ministry employee having not received such a straight answer in nearly four decades, and the children because she had drilled the response into them.

Another unreadable look passed between the sentries as the quintet finally entered the building.

As the kids entered four gasps, and a squawk that H would later tease his familiar about, sounded in the busy hall. The ceiling stood ten meters above them, polished to a fine sheen and composed of what looked like marble streaked with onyx. The walls and floor were of the same material, bringing a sense of sophistication and nobility to the room. Down the hall stood more than fifty desks, each manned (Goblined? H wondered) by a pair of Goblins who were dealing with a wizard, weighing gems, appraising objects, checking keys, and observing formal contract signings. The group moved per the guard's instruction, down a hall that was streaked with gold in addition to marble and onyx. Halfway down the hall they found a door labeled Rel at which they knocked at once, then immediately entered.

Part of what Amelia coached into the kids was that Goblins valued time as much as money, because time was frequently literally money to them. They reportedly had hundreds of Goblins working round the clock computing interest, taxes, and penalties to ensure every count was accurate to the minute.

The Goblin at the solitary desk in the center of the room looked up at their entrance, prompting Amelia to ask, "Master Rel?"

"Please present the keys for the vaults of Ms. Susan Bones, Ms. Abbot, and Ms. Tonks. Ms. Amelia Bones, please present your wand for magical signature verification. Mr. Bones, please step to your left and take a seat."

The kids were all suitably impressed and amelia's instruction was immediately verified, Goblins indeed did not waste time. The girls were led off to their vaults by a series of Goblins once their keys passed muster. Amelia had a wallet linked to her vault and so did not need a visit, she was, however, required to verify her identity to both request and authorize an inheritance test.

The Goblin opened a drawer, and produced a small slab of gold with three circles bound in runes that seemed to draw the eye in and twist one's perspective the longer one looked. H was deep in such a twisting stare when Master Goblin Rel spoke again, causing him to jump.

"Mr. Bones. Please give me one of your hairs, and a drop of your blood. Cut the hair off using this knife," Rel opened another drawer and removed a dagger that had more jewels on it than H had ever seen in his life, "and please make a small cut on the pointer finger of your dominant hand to produce the drop of blood."

H looked very nervous.

H, in a strange coincidence, felt very nervous.

Amelia put a hand on his unoccupied shoulder, and from the other shoulder Hedwig released a melodious chirp in support. Unnoticed by both preoccupied humans, the Goblin closed his eyes at the sound, his expression softening just a hair. There was a reason phoenixes were revered by Goblin kind.

One hair lengthening and two short cuts later, the ritual was nearly begun. Rel took the dagger from H, H's blood still on it, and cut his own long finger with the portion still covered in human blood. The resulting mix was dripped into the final circle on the gold tablet. Master Rel spoke the ritual words in gobbledegook, and before the three beings the gold tablet flattened, lengthened, and became a set of parchments.

"You both entered our halls today intending to complete this ritual. You have not yet seen the results, and now is precisely the final moment you can back away from this. You have shown myself and my kin respect today, and so it is returned. It is possible that you will not like the results of this sheet, in the past many who have undergone this same test have not. Are you both certain you want to continue?"

H looked at Amelia. He wasn't certain. He had only recently become comfortable calling her mum. She had saved him from his old family. She promised him he wouldn't be hurt like that again, she promised she would protect him, and she was the first adult to not have lied to him. What would she do if he turned out to be someone bad? What if he was a Malfoy? What if he was related to one of the men who had killed Hedwig's mother?

Hedwig pressed her cheek to his, wild emotion leaked clearly across their connection, and tried to offer comfort. Amelia to his other side had her own reservations. She had never expressed to H her suspicions that he was from one of the old families. She had told H that he should know who he was, and she had told him that he could have a history and he deserved to know it. Then in the moment she looked at his face and saw his uncertainty. Her hand hadn't left his shoulder, so she gave a squeeze.

"No matter what happens, H, you're still my son. You're still Susan's brother. You still have us, and we won't let you go."

That was what H needed to hear, "We want to see the results, Master Goblin. Thank you for your patience and your help."

Rel looked approvingly on the wizards in front of him, before handing the pair the top copy of the ritual results and taking the bottom copy for himself.

In a manner that would have shamed a dozen generations of his ancestors, Rel was the first to react with a whispered, "Damn."

The top of the page was lined with a header of more mind-bending Goblin runes, which distracted H's eye for a moment before he could break his attention away and look to the first proper line of the parchment, the line that contained his name.

Harry James Potter.

 _Well how about that,_ he thought, _starts with an H and everything, I got pretty close given I only ever saw it once and—_

Harry James Potter.

Harry found himself agreeing wholeheartedly with the Goblin. Damn.

Under his name, written in the same meticulous hand as his name above it, was a family tree that had his mum also agreeing with the good Master Rel.

" _Damn._ "

A line traced Harry's direct ancestry through four hundred years of uninterrupted Potter to the family that begat them, the Peverells. From there the line continued across a veritable who's-who of some of history's most notable witches and wizards until it dead-ended at the coupling of no less noble persons than godric Gryffindor and Helga Hufflepuff themselves.

There were notes below the tree, covering both how records could not extend further back than the formation of the ruling clan, something which occurred shortly after the founding of Hogwarts. Harry's eyes scanned robotically, just to give his brain something to do while it stuttered and stopped it's way to coming to grips with the information it had just received.

On automatic Harry flipped the page to the next one, a sheet of parchment with the auspicious title 'Assets, Pecuniary', the total of which, at the bottom of the page, caused his eyes to bug out. Seeking relief from the madness, he flipped to the next parchment, 'Assets, Demense' at which point the tiny men in his brain that ran around filing papers and pulling lever all simply gave up.

It was too much. All of it.

Harry was _the_ heir, as he was the only descendant of the line of first sons going back to Godric and Helga themselves.

Amelia and the newly named Harry met each other's eyes.

"Mum... I... I'm Harry Potter? So my parents are dead, and from Voldemort? And... what?"

The coldly analytical part of her mind noted that H – Harry, that Harry listened to her lecture and had not questioned the honesty of the test, which would have been a considerable faux-pas. Given that Rel was paging through the parchment looking just as astounded as they each felt it probably would have been forgiven, but better safe than sorry.

"Come here Ha... Harry. Come here kiddo."

Harry rushed to leave his seat and get into the arms of his mum. Hedwig saw the move coming , so she stepped dexterously from Harry's shoulder to the back of his chair, crooning a low and stable note to fortify the whole room.

* * *

Rel was no less overwhelmed than the mother and child in front of him. This was a confluence of events beyond his understanding, and he knew it.

For these accounts, Ragnuk himself needed to be involved. Not in the least because his ancestor's sword stood a solid chance of being reclaimed here and now from a wizard who showed respect to Goblins. This was going to be a very long, but very profitable day. The interest off the accounts alone, with his half percent personal stake, would be enough to fund his mate and their young for the next few centuries.


	6. The Power of a Name

Chapter Five: The Power of a Name

* * *

"How many pounds are in 2000 galleons?" … "This went to the _Dursleys_!?"

* * *

"What is compound interest anyway, and why should a thousand years of it matter?"

* * *

"Of course you can have your sword back! I'm sorry my ancestor took it from yours. It's an awesome sword, I completely understand why you would want it back, please take it. I guess… is there anyway I can leave my family something even half that nice without stealing from you all?"

* * *

"My parents had a will? Can I see it?"

...

"Who are Sirius Black and Remus Lupin? Or this Pettigrew guy? Hey mum! You're on here!"

…

"I wasn't supposed to ever even meet my – those relatives."

* * *

"Mum, you were engaged, and to Sirius Black!"

* * *

Nym and Hannah both left shortly after they got money from their vaults, with Andi taking an impromptu personal day from St. Mungos to provide an escort. They ended up having to ditch the Bones in Gringotts, as what should have been a pleasant afternoon of personal discovery turned into an exploration of the personal effects and familial history of two Hogwarts founders.

Susan chose to stay with her mum and brother for support, and Harry could have kissed her for how much he appreciated it. He needed a steadying hand. None of the Bones got any shopping done, though they had half a month or so before the shopping became vital, so it was alright.

Harry led his mum and sister through a pair of vaults that hadn't been opened in near on a millennia, and shortly thereafter through a vault from the ancient family his had descended from. After picking through piles of journals, deeds, old dented armor sets, and wands, Harry finally got to the vault that he really wanted to see, that of his birth parents.

Harry decided that he may be a Potter, but Amelia had saved him. More than that, she and Susan had given him a true home and, well, love for the first time in his life. He may technically be a Potter, but he was Harry Bones, and nothing could change that.

That said, he nearly fell to his knees at the sight of a wizarding photo of his parents on their wedding day. It was one of the first things in the Potter vault, set in a photo album propped open on a chest in front of the door. It looked like James and Lily, Harry liked the feel of those names on his tongue, hadn't ever gotten around to putting away their wedding things. Harry had been immediately confronted by his parents exchanging vows, right across from his parent's first dance as a married couple. Lily's wedding dress was just laid across a chest to the side of the vault door, like she had been there just a few minutes ago and would be right back to properly put it away.

When they finally made it back to the Ossuary, Harry wore three signet rings for three noble houses thought long lost, and a Potter heir apparent ring. Susan, Amelia, and he also had plans to free their uncle, fiancé, and godfather, respectively, with evidence to back up their plan.

They had come for a family name and gotten a hell of a lot more than they had bargained for.

* * *

Amelia was watching Harry, her son with his third name in less than two years, as he excitedly ran through Flourish and Blotts. She was letting Harry spend a few hundred extra galleons on his things for Hogwarts, and he was using it to buy a number of books he had his eye on since he had been introduced to magic. She had no idea what this 'Burning Man' thing was, or why the shamanic magic from it interested him so much, but the book cost thirty galleons by itself. It wasn't like the pint sized merlin couldn't afford it.

Harry was bringing the texts, journals, and research notes of both of his parents along with him to Hogwarts. He had wanted them so he could have a connection to his birth parents, Amelia had insisted he take them because his parents had been verifiable prodigies and with their notes he could go far. He also was bringing the freshly minted Potter blade, forged by the king of the Goblin clans of the British Isles for him personally, along with the personal journals and research notes from most of his legendary forebears.

In the weeks to come and unbeknownst to the adults, he had also reclaimed the stolen possessions of the Peverell brothers using a piece of family magic he had found in their vault. Harry possessed the invisibility cloak of death herself, and was master of the resurrection stone. The brother's journals talked about the items, the Deathly Hallows, allegedly given to man by death. Harry couldn't reclaim the wand outside of a duel, but the cloak could be summoned at the command of it's master, as could the stone. When it appeared he found the stone to be attached to a ring enchanted with something that felt awful to even be near, and far too heinous to even think about touching. For a nominal fee, the Goblins had agreed to discreetly take care of any enchantments on the ring and return the stone to him by Yule. Harry actually had to talk them into the fee, evidently high-end clients were evidently afforded a different level of banking service, something which included the odd 'no questions asked secret buried in an unmarked vault' service. That one scared him a little.

For all of the extra books he was bringing, Harry needed to buy himself a big trunk. Big verging on ridiculous. So he insisted on buying Susan, Hannah, and Nym greatly expanded trunks in addition to his own, as well as permanently feather-weight bags for their books. He could afford it, so Amelia felt no great guilt. Truth be told, Harry could probably buy a small island and not really notice the expense, and he got an amazing deal buying in bulk.

The Goblins were still working out the deed situation, and if Master Rel was to be believed, they had a team of five working solely on who owed her son exactly what in terms of past due rent.

Before any of them really knew it, the group had assembled all of its necessaries. Nym and Hannah had gone with the group back to Diagon, each finding themselves incapable of missing a second shopping trip. The only thing left for Harry and Susan was their wands. Amelia had put it off for last both because she felt it was a rite of passage, and because after twenty years she still found Ollivander to be very creepy.

The two pre-teens made their way into the store, Amelia a short distance behind, and when the three fully entered the shop, a creaking voice behind them spoke up, "Ah, Miss and Master Bones, or would you prefer your hyphenated title, young lord?"

All three jumped as Ollivander appeared from behind them, and glided his way to the counter.

"My hyphenated title, sir?" Harry asked, when he got his voice back.

Ollivander was idly perusing his shelves, lazily running a finger over the ends of different boxes, as he answered in an idle tone, "Yes, something tells me that saying Lord Gryffindor-Hufflepuff-Peverell-Potter-Bones would get old somewhat quickly. Forgive me if I am being presumptuous, but unless you feel strongly on the matter I believe I will simply stick to calling you Harry."

The strange old man had gathered a number of boxes from the back of his shop at that point, laying them all on the counter by the time Harry nervously gave his assent.

"If you'll forgive me again, Harry, something tells me it may be better to get your esteemed sister matched up before we tackle you," the creepy old man turned his white, almost sightless eyes to Susan, "Miss Bones, Susan, if I may, please present your wand hand."

In a flash the aged wandmaker passed a half dozen wands across her palm, before settling on a short and dark wand, "Please give this a swish, miss. Unless I miss my guess, nine and one quarter inches, darkened ash, with unicorn tail hair should serve..."

Ollivander trailed off as Susan swished her wand, releasing a bright stream of sparks.

"Yes. Excellent." Ollivander smiled, "Now for you, Harry. The wand-maker in me says that this may take a while, so," with a series of flicks from a random wand from the pile, two comfy armchairs appeared behind Harry for his family, and Ollivander began replacing boxes on his shelves and pulling new ones.

A twelve and three-quarters inch beech wood with dragon heartstring caused wings to grow on a trio of other boxes near the front, making them literally fly from the shelves.

A thirteen inch oak wand with a core from a particularly nasty unicorn caught fire as it touched his hand, only to be removed and placed in a jar filled with what looked like clear glue.

Ten inches, driftwood, and a core of crushed basilisk irises touched his hand and blew a hole into the wall across the shop from Harry.

The pattern repeated itself over thirty times, at which point Amelia and Susan were sitting in their chair munching amusedly on popcorn. Harry's clothes were smoking in several places, and smoldering in several more. His hand was bandaged where two separate wands had simply exploded at his touch. Harry was currently missing both eyebrows, and had holes in his robes where a few wands had jumped after having been set ablaze.

The shop looked like a war zone. Two shelves were just missing, having been accidentally vanished. Jars of the clear glue which Ollivander had identified as a fixative agent were everywhere, most containing the fragments of wands that had reacted less than pleasantly to Harry's touch.

Embedded in the ceiling was an eleven inch holly wand with a phoenix feather core. It had been the last wand Ollivander had tried, after much muttering. He had been increasingly exited the more wands Harry tried, but as soon as the last one rejected Harry by rather forcibly flying from his hand and boring a hole in the ceiling, Ollivander's eyes lost a good portion of their zeal, and he walked to the back of his shop while muttering what sounded like a series of welsh curses that questioned the parentage of a few of his works. Amelia was in stitches behind him, evidently having been able to understand the murmured words of the crazed wandmaker.

Before long Ollivander could again be seen picking his way through the wreckage of his shop, carefully avoiding a puddle of bright blue liquid that had spilled and was now gently smoking, reverently holding a wand in both hands.

"This, Harry, is the last wand I have in this shop that could possibly match you. Before you take hold, I must first tell you it's story. This wand was commissioned just shy of a thousand years ago, built by my late great-grandfather, his last creation before he left these shores for the depths of the Brazilian jungle on a final ingredient hunting mission. The wand was commissioned for a man now known as Uric the Oddball," Amelia and Susan both gave a snort to which Ollivander responded with a glare, "Uric the Oddball, then known as Uric Delacroix, was in truth not as history remembers him. The man history has remembered was a man crushed and driven quite mad by the untimely deaths of his wife and unborn daughter. Before he began recreational badger corpse handling and the usage of cephalopods as headwear, Uric was one of the world's most feared hit wizards and duelists. He had this wand commissioned scant weeks before the inn he resided at with his wife collapsed, claiming her life. Eight inches, made of sweet wormwood taken from a particularly massive specimen, with a core of the collected feathers of a dozen augurey Uric coaxed into the shop.

The ladies present had sobered considerably during the minor history lesson. Amelia though had not stopped munching on the popcorn she had conjured.

With what was now a significant amount of caution, Ollivander cast a shield around himself and the remainder of his intact wares (Amelia having done the same for both her and Susan), and he gingerly handed the wand to Harry.

As soon as it touched his skin Harry's hand closed reflexively around it. Like the waves from a stone dropped into a pond, a frisson of energy and sensation covered Harry's body.

There was a rising sound of bird cry, first only one voice, then two, then a chorus. Harry looked around the store wildly at the sound, but no one else seemed to be reacting to the noise. The voices formed a deep and terrifying harmony, a sound that felt like it was burying itself in his brain, similar but opposite from how he felt Hedwig. When the noise reached as deep into his head as it seemed to be able to go they broke off their dark song and called out one final time, this one sound leaking out of his head and into the real audible world around him.

"Curious things, Auguries. It was believed that their cries heralded death, though we know now they precede merely rain. Still, the belief persists young Harry, the belief persists…"

* * *

Amelia had taken the three weeks before the kids left for Hogwarts off of work, so she was strongly looking forward to September second, when she could formally look up the charges surrounding one Sirius Black, and bring into evidence the last will and testament of the Potters.

She was greatly surprised by how well Harry was handling everything. The kid had an indomitable will, and between her, Susan, and Hedwig, he handled yet another world shaking event with relative aplomb.

Just as much as she was looking forward to seeing her Sirius again, she was also looking forward to putting an auror on the case of what the hell actually happened to Harry. He lost his parents in defense of the entire wizarding world, the least they could do was ensure he had a decent childhood. The trail was now very cold, but self-updating records were one of an investigative auror's greatest assets, and she was now dead certain that their records surrounding October 31st 1981 needed a second or third look.

She was grateful for it, but no part of how he had become a Bones should have been allowed to come to pass in the first place, even if she was very glad it all had ended as it did. All of the wills, record systems, and bureaucracy that were made to protect kids shouldn't have failed even half as easily as it had for Harry.

A lot of questions needed answering.


	7. To Hogwarts!

Chapter Six: To Hogwarts!

* * *

The brilliant, and mildly eye watering, crimson of the Hogwarts Express temporarily blinded Harry as he and his family entered platform nine and three-quarters.

For the purposes of the train ride Harry had agreed with Amelia's reasoning and now wore brilliantly red shoulder length hair and significantly toned down green eyes alongside a few other minor facial changes. Amelia convinced him that his normal form looked a lot like a young James Potter, and while she had had been uncertain of his identity for a few years, people expected Harry Potter to be here and so would correctly put two and two together.

He would reveal himself at the sorting (which Amelia still refused to describe to them!), but until then he was going to ignore his real identity. She and Andi had impressed on Harry how much people would want to know him and want something from him. This way, anyone they met on the train who wanted to be friends would want to be friends with him and not with the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry had read enough of the books describing his own supposed life to have an idea what he was in for.

Once properly inside, Amelia had directed them to the front of the train. It seemed the head boy and girl always reserved the front car for the prefect meeting and as a base for prefects on patrol. The closer they were to it, the less likely they would be to run into any trouble from angry teens playing with wands again after a summer off.

The kids put their things in a compartment and Harry locked the door behind them with a firm _colloportus_ , then the four went out to say good-bye to their folks.

Hannah shared an oddly formal parting with her family, while Amelia and Andi shared a rather intense group hug with Susan, Nym and Harry. Susan and Nym had never really been away from home before, and Harry was dealing with a significant identity change on top of never having had something he thought of as home before. They all knew they would each miss the hell out of each other, and inside of a week Amelia half-suspected that she would get Poppy Pomfrey on the floo requesting that she comfort a home sick kid.

While they shared their good-bye, a red-headed crowd from outside the platform came in and with much shouting, hugging and wringing of hands, made their way onto the train. A loud and deep bell sounded around the platform nearly as they entered, indicating the train would be heading out in ten minutes. Amelia and Andi reluctantly released their children to a waiting Hannah, and the groups departed.

After a short wait, the train began to move, and from their spots near the windows Harry and Susan watched the red-heads move their kids on to the slowly speeding up train. The two that looked like twins promised what sounded like a toilet seat to the only child remaining on the platform, and in a moment, the train had finally left Kings Cross for pastures cleverly illusioned to be greener.

The kids started to amuse themselves by opening Lily Potter's notebooks and setting them next to their charms text and trying out some of the first spells they would be learning in their classes. It was a routine they had repeated a dozen times since Harry's first mind bending visit to Gringotts, and perhaps it was his unquenchable enthusiasm for it, but Harry was showing a surprising aptitude for the art. Tracing his finger over the lines written by his biological mother, Harry followed her advice to the letter and over the course of the first hour or so of the train ride successfully cast each of their first year's charms. The family had gotten up to levitation spells when their first interruption arrived at the door.

A small member of the loud red-headed clan knocked on their door at two hours in, after visibly examining everyone in the compartment he began, "Hey, have any of you heard where Harry Potter is sitting? My mum told me to sit with him."

Everyone looked at Harry, who sighed at the group's lack of subtlety and obvious vote for him to be the spokesperson, "No idea mate, good luck finding him. Any idea why your mum told you to sit with him?"

As he closed the door, the red head who hadn't bothered to introduce himself replied, "Apparently Dumbledore told her to."

Harry looked around the compartment at that, Susan and Hannah shared looks of confusion and Nym looked angry.

"Interesting."

The spunky metamorph immediately responded, "Troubling, I think."

Susan and Hannah looked sad as they nodded in agreement, Nym looked actively angry which mirrored how Harry felt on the inside. A cursory glance at the Potter will showed that it had been sealed by Dumbledore at his parent's death, and no one had known what to think.

They resumed their work, moving slowly from Lily to James and from charms to transfiguration, working their way as best they could through the syllabus. Amelia had given them all copies of her own notes from school, but when she gave them to the family she had freely admitted Harry's biological family just had a flair for magic she hadn't ever been able to match, "They were Head Boy and Girl for a good reason, especially James. He never made prefect but still found his way to the top spot, and we always thought the strength of his magic was a big part of why."

An hour later, the second interruption came in the form of a head full of bushy brown hair and a boy hiding squarely in it's shadow.

"HelloI'mHermioneGrangerandthisisNeville, haveanyofyouseen-"

Her words came out fast, all flying from her mouth in rapid fire but somehow each not tripping over any other. It was odd, certainly an efficient, if impractical method of communication, but the speed with which she spoke was not what caught the compartment's attention. Her tone was so terribly, horribly, maddeningly _resigned_. Like she was so used to not finishing her thought and expected to be immediately told to bugger off that she was determined to get her thought out, and to hell with anything else. It was a strategy that spoke of bitter experience, and given how they were seated on one extreme end of the train, Harry figured it was entirely possible.

In this case, the girl with the bushy hair was the one to interrupt herself, as Hannah's look of intense concentration and eventual transfiguration of a cauldron cake into an actual (if tiny) cauldron caused her to sputter to a stop and gaze excitedly on the small orange and pumpkin scented cauldron in Susan's hand.

"Ooh! Are you trying magic! I've tried a number of the spells from our textbooks and I haven't had much trouble, but I've never done anything that big. Its transfiguration, isn't it? I kept getting stuck on the teacup into teapot, I think because of the size difference."

There was a moment of confused silence as the four friends took a moment to process the torrent of words from the girl, as well as the appearance of the boy at her side.

Harry started, remembering the girl's name from her entrance, "Hullo Hermione, I'm Harry Bones, this is my sister Susan, and our friends Hannah Abbot and Nymphadora," who began growling, " 'I-Will-stab-You-If-You-Use-My-First-Name' Tonks. Useful side note: she actually did stab me once, even if it was only with a particularly sharp spoon, so be careful. Otherwise, nice to meet you!"

Harry turned a supportive smile to the kid who was so painfully shy he seemed to be still trying to hide behind Hermione, trying to gently prompt him to introduce himself. It took a small awkward moment but eventually it worked.

"I-I'm Neville L-Longbottom."

Harry perked up instantly, and all of the girls around him twitched.

"Neville Longbottom," Harry said quickly, "Son of Frank and Alice Longbottom?"

Harry looked keenly at the boy sitting across from him, before standing and going to the door of their compartment. The room behind him was silent as he poked his head into the corridor, looked about, and then closed their compartment, latching the door's lock as he sat down again.

Arranging himself briefly for the unfamiliar in his audience, Harry sat still for a moment and closed his eyes. As Hermione and Neville looked on the red seemed to drain from his hair, leaving behind a slightly more auspicious head of unkempt black hair. His chin narrowed slightly, his nose tweaked slightly, as though it had once been broken, and when his eye repoened they gleamed killing curse green.

"So I told you a second ago that my name is Harry Bones, and it is! I mean that is totally, completely, and legally true. It's just that I was born with a different name, my biological parents named me Harry Potter."

Neville's eyes widened, _the_ Harry Potter! The new face in the room certainly looked the part, Hermione beside him was positively buzzing with unasked questions, but the hands she had clasped over her mouth seemed to indicate that she wanted to see this play out.

Harry scratched the back of his head, looking out the window briefly, "I only found out who I was like two weeks ago. I had… kind of a hard time growing up. I was really short of real family."

HE went silent for a moment, his silence filling the room, then he looked to Neville, "I've been looking for you since I found out who I was, because one of the first things I found was that your mum was named my godmother when I was born, and my mum was named your godmother. Our parents were really close, and when my parents died I was supposed to go to her and your family, to live with you."

Harry's story seemed to lend steel to Neville's spine as he went on, and as Harry wound down Neville sat forward, "I-I, you… well you probabaly know the story. After my parents went to S-Saint Mungo's I've lived with my Grandmother. W-We don't go out much."

There was a heavy silence in the compartment as Neville and Harry both confronted what they could have had if anything had been even just a little different, the weight of the moment kept the audience from interrupting.

"Voldemort, eh?," Harry said, a weak grin on his face, "What a bastard."

Neville cringed for an instant at the hated name, but couldn't suppress his dark chuckle at the sentiment. Harry smiled widely at the sound, and the tension in the compartment eased.

The day after the Bones got back from Gringotts Nym remarked to her new old friend Harry that his life was more fun than the stories her mom listened to on the Wizarding Wireless Network. She told him not only did his new name suit him, but she liked him before he turned out to be Harry Potter, which was not unlike the plot of the last drama Andi had made her sit through. Now she was sitting on the Hogwarts Express, avidly watching the drama unfolding on the bench across from here, munching on conjured popcorn (she silently sent thanks to Amelia who had painstakingly taught her the spell) with Hannah and Susan, both of whom had agreed with her assessment a little over two weeks ago.

Harry tentatively offered his hand across the aisle, and Neville turned the shake into an awkward hug bridging the gap. Hermione moved over to the bench now shared by the other girls and leaned over to whisper, "Is it always like this in the wizarding world? It's only my first day and I think I've accidentally re-united a family."

Nym scooted over to give her a bit more room, and offered her the bowl of popcorn, "Not the whole world, though in our experience, it is what life is like with Harry."

Hermione politely accepted and began munching with the other girls, "Cool."

It took half an hour, but Harry eventually was able to pay attention to something other than his new friend. Hermione was introduced to the whole group properly, and the onslaught of her questions devolved everything into a discussion of the magical world and magic in general.

Harry who was, all told, still fairly new to the magical world served as a translator of sorts for Hermione. They had a fantastic time blowing the bushy haired girl's mind by showing her the age old wizarding game of exploding snap. She seemed to think it was worse than the mundane version because at least not paying attention to one's cards in the normal version didn't get one singed, though her complaints were quickly ignored.

The third and thankfully final interruption to their journey came in the form of a skinny, platinum blonde haired boy followed by two others whose body hair and ridiculous size made them look startlingly like gorillas. The door to their compartment was still magically locked, so the three interlopers on the other side of the frosted glass just knocked on the window to the compartment loudly and imperiously.

"Ah shite," Neville said, only to be glared at by Hermione, "Sorry, I meant 'oh poo', anyway, that's Draco Malfoy. He's one of the big pureblood supremacy fanatics."

Hermione shot Harry a confused glance, and he added, "Think those National Front lunatics, but instead of anyone not white, its anyone with non-magical relatives. They call you guys muggleborn if they're feeling nice and mudbloods if they're feeling mean. Their word for non-magicals is muggles."

"Oh. Gross."

A voice both annoyed and annoying called in from the outside, "Oi! Open up!"

Harry elbowed Nym and turned to Neville, "Nev! Tell us what he looks like!"

It took the two metamorphs about four minutes to get close enough to Draco's form for Neville to approve. The fact that the two minutes were filled with exclamations of 'I can hear you in there!' and 'If you don't open up, my father will hear about this!' almost made the pair slowdown in their efforts.

When they finished they gave everyone else a moment to get back into their seats, before Harry cancelled his spell and they let the young Malfoy open the door. Harry started the festivities.

"I say, _our_ father will hear of your rudeness. Trying to get into our compartment! The indignity of it!"

"Indeed, I can hardly believe the audacity of this man!" Nym continued in an over-the-top pompous accent.

"What do you two think you're playing at! I'm Draco Malfoy, no one mocks House Malfoy in this manner! My father will hear of this attack on the honor of my house!"

Harry and Nym both had trouble keeping straight faces, but each had significant experience controlling their features and were doing better than the rest of their compartment. Hermione was burying her face in Hannah's shoulder. Hannah and Susan each looked an instant away from bursting out into laughter that would kill lesser people, and Neville, having had training from his grandmother in comportment and bearing, was merely bright red in the face with a smile a kilometer across.

Harry pushed it a bit farther, "Not before our father hears of your assault on the dignity of the house! Dressing in third hand robes like that, honestly! We may just begin writing him now! Especially since you seem to have two micro-trolls trailing you. As if any self-respecting Malfoy would allow that!"

Nym, for her part, stood and opened her trunk, evidently looking around for parchment. In reality she needed to look away so she could actually smile, but when she met the eyes of her audience, she came a millimeter from losing it. Seeing how close she was to losing it, and how close everyone else was, she decided to end it.

"We are simply done with you, you stain on House Malfoy's honor. You and your no doubt sullied lineage will hear from our father soon!"

With that she slammed the door closed, and Harry shot off another _colloportus_ as well as a _silencio._ Just in time, it turned out, as the entire group fell apart in laughter.

The remaining few hours of the journey passed with no more distractions, but no less laughter. The sight of Malfoy, who had accosted Neville in his search for his toad, gawking at two copies of himself who parroted his own annoying attitude right back at him was something no one in the group would soon forget.

The case of the missing toad had reared its head, somewhat guiltily, soon after Malfoy departed. However one of the first spells that Amelia and Andi both had taught the kids upon their receiving wands was the summoning charm. The spell was considered fourth year, but it was almost like everything about it was tailored to be the first thing you would teach a child. The intent and emotion behind the summoning charm was all about 'Come here!' and 'Gimme!', something you would be hard pressed to find a child that didn't understand. Lily Potter's journals contained what seemed like a dissertation on the topic.

Her journal had chapters dedicated to this line of thought, something she felt made charms one of the simplest branches of magic. The journal contended that charms were simple because the intents associated with them were simple. It was why charms were some of the most widely used magic. The willpower component in the locking charm was _LOCK_ or if it had to be reduced down to a simpler idea, _NO MOVEMENT_. Silencing charms (typically fifth year spell work) were simpler still, _QUIET_. The summoning charm was a little more complicated, depending on how you thought of it. When most people used it they were careful to have their summoned object not impact anything on its way to them, that made the intent _COME HERE, DON'T HIT THINGS._ A more general usage in open ground was an easier _COME HERE_ , which was why it was widely considered easier to summon things over open ground or not around corners.

Harry used a simple _Accio Trevor_ to get his new friend and old brother Neville his toad back.

Before any of them knew it, it was time to get off the train. A quick change into school robes for the one non-magical raised in the group, a change of form for the one famous magical in the group, and they were ready.

They were escorted to a small dock and then into boats by a massive guy named Hagrid. Harry elbowed Nym when they saw the man, each of them in quiet awe of the man's size. They each knew a _lot_ about what was physically possible, and this Hagrid fellow was simply too big to be allowed.

He was still trying to figure it out while making small talk with Nym and Neville in the boat, right up until they cleared the cove the dock was in, and got an actual view of Hogwarts. In an instant Harry understood why people came there. Just being in line of sight, he could practically feel the magic coming off the place in waves. It felt like his wand had when he first laid a finger on it , but... _bigger_.

As they got closer to the castle, their view was cut off by the massive cliff the castle rested on.

"Heads down, everyone," called out the enormous man, and after passing under a large stone overhang, the group of first year students found themselves inside a cavern with another dock. They each disembarked, and made their way up several hundred feet of staircase to find themselves before a door that stood nearly seven meters tall.

Hagrid made a quick head count, then knocked three times on the door, which opened immediately to the stern visage of a highland lass. Thus were Harry and his friends introduced to the finest magical teaching institution in the western hemisphere.

Before long the mass of first years stood before the people they would be spending the next six years with. There was a significant amount of not-so-subtle staring and muttering. Harry Potter, the savior of wizarding society the world over was supposed to be part of this year after all! Harry guessed that were he not, in point of fact, himself, he too may have indulged in a little recreational staring action. If he really thought about it, he couldn't blame them, but the knowledge that six class year's worth of students and evidently the full staff table were all looking for him wasn't really a comfort, somehow.

He had a few discussions with Amelia over this, and they , despite two weeks, hadn't reached a solid conclusion. Harry had to have some kind of physical arrangement, some definite form he was going to use here. It didn't have to be his base form, after all it didn't cost him anything to maintain a transformation, just to get there in the first place. Unfortunately his base appearance was easily associated with Harry Potter. It all came down to whether or not he wanted to eventually be outed as Harry Potter. Whether or not he wanted to deal with all that, and in fairness to him, there was an awful lot of that.

He was entered on the roll call for Hogwarts twice, after all. Amelia had ensured he was on as H Bones when she adopted him, and the name Potter had been down since his covert birth in Godric's Hollow. He could be whoever he wanted to, but he did have to pick in the next few minutes. His decision would be made one way or the other as soon as the name H Bones was called by Professor McGonagall.

Nym, Susan, and Hannah were clustered around him, each giving as much non-verbal support as they could. None of them had any valuable insight on the decision, he checked. Even Hermione and Neville were sensing his discomfort. They were assuming it was due to the upcoming sorting, which in a way it was.

Harry wanted to honor the woman that saved him. Harry also wanted to honor the woman that gave birth to him, and the man that helped that whole process along. Harry wanted to just live his damn life. Where the devil could he find option three in this whole mess? A small part of him kind of missed just being H Bones.

Unfortunately while he wasted all that time deciding his future, the sorting hat sang its song, and names were already rolling off the list held in the hands of an irate Scotswoman.

Abbot, Hannah was sent to the house of his noble ancestor Helga Hufflepuff. His dear sister Bones, Susan followed suit. After her name, his decision was reached. The Name Bones, H was called, and Harry didn't come forward to answer. Nym squeezed hard where she had a grip on his hand. Harry idly wondered why they went by last name alphabetically, but H somehow came after Susan? Maybe they went reverse alphabetically by first name in the event of siblings? Or was it a ladies first kind of thing? From Godric's journal it seemed like he would have wanted it that way. Helga would have wanted it the other way though, but she did like it like that through spite and only when it amused her to make Godric angry. Come to think of it, maybe she didn't actually care when it came to naming traditions that would be followed for the next thousand years? It wasn't a feminism thing, she just liked annoying the ever loving hell out of her normally unflappable husband. If her journal was any kind of tell, it was her favorite hobby by a pretty wide margin. Hmmm... If only Rowena had living descendants to inherit her journals. But then, if they weren't inherited, where did they go? She wouldn't have _not_ had journals or research notes. She also wouldn't have just left them lying around. Maybe after that whole debacle with Helena she put them here somewhere? Her whole deal was some of the most tragic load of bollocks Harry had ever heard, and he had heard of, well him, he guessed. That whole line of thought just kept circling itself, so he shook his head and cleared it away for another time.

Refocusing on the outside world, Harry looked up. Shite. Where did everyone else go? He was standing next to that red headed kid from the train and some other guy, everyone else was sitting. Hermione, Neville, Susan, Hannah, and Nym were all at the yellow and black table giving him some incredibly confused looks. He had solidly missed both of his names being called. Double shite. That's what he got for not paying attention. It was a third solution though. Now, how was he going to play this? The redhead was called followed by the other guy. Turned out the ginger was Ronald Weasley and tall dark and handsome was Blaise Zabini, good to know he figured, but now he was standing alone in front of about a thousand people. This was exactly the kind of thing he hoped to avoid.

He knew both his mum, his sister, his friends, and especially Hermione would all not be pleased with him and this thought processes, but under his breath he felt compelled to whisper, "Well Fuck."

Professor McGonagall beckoned him forward, and in a brisk tone that mysteriously didn't carry in the cavernous hall asked him who he was and if his name had been called.

Harry sighed, moment of truth.

"Sorry ma'am, but, no ma'am. My mum took me to get an inheritance ritual at Grongotts two weeks ago, I'm an orphan, see. I was registered under H Bones, but that's not really true anymore, so I was confused, also," Harry closed his eyes for a second and let himself fall back into the normal appearance he kept around the house, his awful hair resurfacing alongside his slightly more broad face, "Things are just sort of complicated for me."

There were gasps along the hall, followed instantly by whispered explanations from those that knew. There was a metamorph at Hogwarts, things were about to become more interesting. As the whispers continued, and behind McGonagall's back, Nym shifted her hair wildly through the rainbow in a show of solidarity.

Two metamorphs, very interesting then.

At the center of the room the poor Transfiguration professor's brain short circuited for a moment, her eyes widening at the blatant display of ability, "Well. I. Er. I. Umm...," McGonagall put a hand to her hip and began scratching her head with the other.

Harry let a blush cross his cheeks for a moment, and lifting his hand discretely to where it was blocked by their bodies, made the rings the Goblins gave him flicker back into visibility, "I'm also apparently a lord?"

The old woman's jaw dropped slightly. Another development that would complicate things. Now that she knew what she was looking for she could feel the magic on the rings, like a shadow at the edge of her vision. They were Head of House rings, for a Noble and Ancient House, with everything those capital letters implied. She felt a shudder through her magic, a third eye she had blinded many decades ago wiggled slightly in awful anticipation of the paperwork she would be forced to fill out regarding this eleven year old child.

In his defense, she reflected, he was indeed apparently a lord.

Shaking her head, she refocused, "We shall just table the name issue for now, I think, er, milord. Lets just get you sorted so the feats may begin."

Harry was only too happy to comply.

Neither of the two speaking privately at the sorting stool could know it, but McGonagall had never once been seen so flustered in all of the time she had spent in the halls of Hogwarts. Her appearing confused was making Dumbledore actually forget that Harry Potter hadn't been sorted, or even sent a letter by the magic of Hogwarts. The aged headmaster, and arguably master of all of the wizarding people of the United Kingdom, hadn't been this worried since the last war.

Harry quickly sat and McGonagall placed the hat on his head. There was a beat of silence, the whole hall was intrigued by where the boy would be placed, not in the least because he was a metamorph at this stage, this was the most flustered anyone had seen the old tabby.

Then the sorting hat broke a thousand years of tradition by speaking out of turn in order to say, "Daaaaaaaaamn."

For twenty minutes, in a atmosphere of hushed whispers and grumbly bellies, that hat proceeded to carry an animated and very silent conversation with the boy beneath its rim. Finally Harry took off the hat and turned giggling to a speechless and incredibly hungry hall.

He took a few steps towards his friends, doing his best to suppress his snickers, "Thanks, Val! Good talk! Call out for Hedwig if you wanna just shoot the breeze sometime."

Abruptly, as though a silenceing charms had suddenly given out, the hat's apparent laughing movements became audible,"Hahahahaha, will do, kid, will do. And you remember, if that wand tells you something, you listen, eh?"

"Yes sir!" Harry threw the hat a jaunty salute, before sitting down at a speechless Hufflepuff table.

No one clapped, no one moved. Up at the front of the hall Mcgonagall hadn't stopped staring at the hat.

On the stool, Valentino the Hat puffed up for a second and said out loud, "Sorry! Kid distracted me, dear god watch out for this one."

From where he sat between Nym and Hermione, Harry called out, "Hey you were the one to say no sharing!"

"Shut up, kid! Anyway, HUFFLEPUFF!"

Susan and Hannah face palmed, Nym smiled, Hermione and Neville looked astounded, and somewhere across the country the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement shivered and got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

* * *

 _Much_ later that night, Harry smiled as he lay back in his bed. It had been a good day. He found two new friends, it appeared as if the love he shared with his friends was enough to get them all into the house of his ancestor, and he had managed to get through an entire two hour long meeting with the man himself, Albus Dumbledore without giving a single thing away that he did not intend to.

The entire school had seen him morph, but being a metamorph was something that wasn't much fun to hide, he and Nym hadn't planned on keeping it a secret at all.

Hedwig's existence was an entirely open secret, the _Prophet_ had done a piece on them not too long ago anyhow.

Dumbles had been very insistent that he reveal which Most Ancient and Noble Houses he was head of, to which Harry had claimed familial privileges, specifically regarding the personal security of the head of house. The old man had also been very insistent that Harry give that name he had been born with so he could be properly registered with the school. Harry updated his admission to Harry Bones, then claimed familial privileges. The master and commander of Hogwarts (as far as he knew) proceeded to demand that Harry reveal any and all knowledge he possessed about the location, wellbeing, and fate of one Harry James Potter. Harry chuckled that the man who had never once checked on him at the Dursleys would know what he looked like, then claimed familial privileges. It was fun, and entirely unfair, exactly how much he could just sweep under the rug with that particular loophole, and it was one of dozens littering the justice system, was somewhat obscene.

That conversation was one of the reasons he was so glad that he was a metamorph. Control over his body meant he had some control over his scars. He couldn't make them go away, something about the transformation magic that helped him heal and made him _very_ difficult to injure stopped him from making the reminders of the wounds he _did_ get disappear. The control he had was over placement. Harry just made sure to move all his scars to his lower back whenever he morphed. It was out of the way, and no one would think of looking at an eleven year olds back to find a certain lightning bolt shaped scar. After finding out who he was, Harry had done an extensive survey of his body and managed to turn up the scar that should have identified him.

His mum had coached him well on everything he needed to keep what secrets he had. The girls all had a number of years worth of occlumency practice which while not especially effective in preteens, did mean that push come to shove, his secrets were safe there.

Overall, definitely a good day.


	8. Classes and Giants

Chapter Seven: Classes and Giants

Harry got up early the next morning. He had a rich full day planned for his first twenty four hours at Hogwarts, and if he wanted to clear out his to-do list, he had to get going.

Dawn saw him tickling a painting of a pear near the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room. James Potter's journal had been clear on exactly how often the elves of Hogwarts had come through for him, and beyond how useful being on good terms with them was, Harry just wanted to see his people.

Even if he had put most of the years of abuse he had suffered firmly behind him, there were some things that just didn't change. One of those things is what had prompted the elves working on the Bones family properties to officially adopt him as an honorary elf. There was a true kinship between beings that lived to serve, Harry's years spent serving a family that hated him, the years spent working as a literally nameless serf, made him a part of what made a house elf a house elf. It was a cultural thing.

They were just _his_ people, so Harry made it a priority to go in and meet the local chapter.

He got out of the kitchens shortly before breakfast was set to start, having met all of the primary elves in charge of the different pieces of Hogwarts. After promising to come in and do a little bonding with them later in the week over the remainder of the opening feast's dishes, Harry went upstairs to grab a bite.

His entrance into the great hall did not go unmarked, as the Hogwarts rumor mill was going wild over the first student in living memory to both distract the sorting hat, and get the hat to actively speak outside of its normal song. His name not being formally called was strange, but not too unusual. There were a number of kids over the last few years who had to do the same thing. Everyone currently a student was part of the end of the war generation, last name issues weren't altogether uncommon with the amount of orphans it left.

By the time he finally hit the great hall his friends were already there, so Harry poked a surly early morning Nym, forcing her to move over a bit on the bench and make room between her and Hermione so he could sit. Her skin tone moved a shade closer to red as he poked her, it was a game they played in the morning sometimes (Harry played it, anyway) where her coloration represented how close she was to committing murder. It laid at a comfortable rosy pink already, and Harry suspected it was because Hermione looked like she was a morning person. The bushy haired witch's brightly smiling face proving it.

"I can't wait to get our schedules and go to our first classes! Today is the first day we get to learn magic!"

Harry smiled. He knew how she felt. He had been there too, back two years ago. Harry still remembered his first afternoon in the library at the Ossuary fondly. Before too long their portly and vivacious head of house came by and gave them their schedules. Their first day had charms, potions, and herbology to look forward to, and when the group all finished their breakfasts, they moved along to their first classroom.

Charms was taught by Fillius Flitwick, the same man who had taught his folks. Lily's journals had some amusing anecdotes about the man, but were overwhelming filled with warmth in reference to the tiny quarter Goblin. Fifteen minutes into the class, Harry could see why. Professor Flitwick had a consuming passion for his subject, and when Harry, Nym, Susan, and Hannah all killed their first attempts, he nearly exploded in happiness.

Harry carefully noted the hours Flitwick had open for people to visit him in his office, and resolved to go and talk to him about some of the things from his birth-mum's journals. Subtly of course, wouldn't do to give anyone confirmation of who he was.

They had a brief break, during which the friends wandered about the castle in a general downwardly direction. Something that everyone agreed on, Amelia, Andi, the Abbots, his parent's journals, and even the founders, was that the castle had… inconsistent… geography. Hermione had wanted to see the library, but everyone else was more than happy to wander and shoot the breeze as they made their way to the potions dungeon.

Soon they were waiting at the door to the classroom, and Harry and Nym were competing again to see who could morph closest to a dog. The pair had gone farther in their work as metamorphs than probably any other in recent history, two years of constant competition in self-transfiguration had led them to the point where they could do nearly complete physical transformations, into almost any form they could think of. The last barrier that both were looking to breach was transfiguration of the head and brain, which was actually the hardest part of the animagus transformation process and all human transfiguration. As it stood, Susan, Hermione, Hannah and Neville were all laughing as two big barking dogs with massive pitbull-ish heads (in order to compensate for increased brain size) were chasing each other around their legs. The pair's antics ate up the minutes until the class formally began and before anyone knew it the entire first year classes of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw were filing into the potions room.

Professor Severus Snape stood at the front of the room, his cloak gently waving in a breeze that seemed to only affect him. Harry loosely paid attention as he talked on about potions. Something about bottling fame and brewing glory, both of which sounded unlikely to him.

The professor began calling out role, pausing minutely at Harry's name. After he finished the roll call, he flicked his wand at the board, revealing a recipe for what he called a simple boil curing potion, before he left the room entirely, leaving into what looked like a massive storage closet. Harry shared a dubious look with Hermione and Susan who were sharing a table with him.

"Is this what potions is? He talks a bit, then puts directions up and leaves?"

Hermione looked deeply conflicted, and Susan spoke up, "You remember what Aunty told us, he probably wasn't going to be a good teacher," Susan leaned closer to Harry and began whispering, "Your mum wrote that he was good at brewing, but just a monster of a person. I suppose this is just how he teaches."

Harry nodded, and the trio at the bench got their ingredients together and began brewing. Snape reappeared at the end of the class period, and collected samples from each of the student groups. Then he just told all of the kids to leave. Harry was really glad he hadn't outed himself as a Potter. The Lord only knew how a man who acted like this to random people would act towards the son of the woman he betrayed and the man he hated.

The group ate lunch, and shortly thereafter went through a delightful lesson in herbology. Professor Sprout was a warm and kind woman, and the subject matter was something Harry had a _lot_ of personal experience with. He didn't have a tenth of the natural ability Neville seemed to possess, but between the two of them they carried the girls through the lesson.

With classes done for the day, Harry was free to pursue his to-do list. Objective one combined general castle exploration with retracing the steps of his ancestors. Godric and Helga both dedicated a lot of time to stalking their dear friends Rowena through the castle, somewhat Scooby-Doo in Harry's opinion, and due entirely to a deadly cocktail of curiosity, boredom, and an odd fascination with the poor woman's tumultuous personal life.

The pair tracked their friend around the castle and their suspicions were collectively aroused when half the time she managed to disappear completely on the seventh floor. Harry wanted to have a bit of a look around.

Of the group, only Nym was really interested in more wandering with Harry. The rest of the group was working on boning up on transfiguration for the next day, but seeing as both Nym and The two metamorphs took to wandering up and down the halls on the seventh floor with a glamored copy of volume four of Helga's journal. Amelia hadn't let originals leave the vault, and had glamoured the copy Harry had made so no one would be able to see it as anything but a late edition of _Hogwarts: A History_.

Nym was quickly distracted by a tapestry of what appeared to be an insane wizard introducing some swamp trolls to ballet, slowly trying to get her features to match those of the wizard, while Harry was walking up and down the hallway muttering and paging through the journal.

"Helga was better at tracking magical traces than Godric was, and her maps of the signature trails seemed to end in this hallway, but what was up here for her? I wish Hermione were here, she said she memorized Hogwarts: A History, maybe they closed off a suite or a classroom or something?"

Harry slowly trailed off as he noticed a door appear in the wall behind Nym. Nym turned to him, assuming he had been distracted by her.

"What? See something you like?" she said with a cheeky grin.

Harry's gaze didn't waver for an instant as he said with conviction, "Yes. Yes I do."

He took a few slow steps towards her, his eyes burning with a green fire like the heart of an emerald in firelight, her distraction driving her to fall unintentionally back into her base form.

"I dunno Harry we're still a bit young for that kinda thing, I do like you but maybe we should wait a few years, it's not like we don't have time and like I said we're too you and it wouldn't be responsible and..."

Harry figured out where her mind was (the gutter) before he started walking, so he decided to prolong the embarrassment for her. She babbled more and more as he got closer, until he was almost making contact and she looked like she was standing in front of an oncoming train. Then he took a quick step to the right and continued on to the door, leaving the eleven year old metamorph confused, embarrassed, and _just_ a little frustrated.

He laughed, as he crossed to the door and opened it, looking back at her instead of in.

"Well, you coming? Or would it be irresponsible and something we should do when we're older?"

Nym stomped up and smacked his shoulder, "Prat."

Inside was a massive workroom, with six huge tables running down the center, each supporting a dozen cauldrons that looked like they'd seen better days. In shelves across the room lay dozens of hand written volumes, and on massive slates hanging from the ceiling were written even more odd patterns and esoteric equations.

Nym and Harry both gave a gasp. A secret room. A secret _work_ room.

Rowena's secret work room?

Harry gave Nym a curious look, "There is no way this is what it looks like, right?"

Nym walked forward and paged through an open book on a lectern at the head of the hall. Harry started looking through some of the parchment rolls on the table at the edges of the hall.

"I dunno, Harry. This looks like a journal, and it looks pretty authentic, and... yeah. This is signed as volume seventy-four of the research notes of Rowena Ravenclaw."

Harry hurried over and began looking beside her at the bound volume.

"Do you think she kept the rest of her journals around here somewhere?"

As soon as the words left Harry's mouth, a table appeared next to the pair loaded two deep with even more leather-bound journals, each with a single number embossed on the front. Both kids jumped when it materialized.

"You just asked for it and it appeared!" Nym exclaimed, torn between disbelief and plain old amazement.

Harry looked around with a new glint in his eye, and addressed the room at large, "Can I see Ravenclaw's collected research notes?"

Immediately a new series of bookshelves appeared along the wall next to the door, each filled with bound notebooks that were numbered in the same style as the journal next to them.

"Let's save the exploration for when we have the group together, sound good?" Nym nodded, "I'll grab her first journal, and the notebook she had out. Maybe it explains this stuff," Harry said, waving a hand at the cauldrons, and floating crystals, and the lightly glowing runes.

Harry grabbed the books, and the pair beat feet out of the mysterious room. One of the first things every child was taught upon introduction to the greater magical world was to never, ever, trust any object that could think for itself. Amelia had been in prime position to witness some truly disturbing things done by door knobs, bed-pans, and wristwatches that had been enchanted to life. Naturally she had been very keen to impart to her muggle raised son that tidbit; fi you can't see what it uses to think, do not trust it. The room was cool, scary, and definitely qualified for that warning.

As Harry and nym descended to the dungeons, and Hufflepuff House, Harry glanced again at his to-do list.

\- Explore castle (seventh floor?)

\- Head transfiguration

-Shrieking shack

-Morph into a stag

-Prank headmaster's office

-Figure out why Hagrid was nine feet tall

Optional/impossible:

\- Make Minerva actively smile

If he found something this absolutely insane on day one/objective one, he was honestly afraid of how the next week was going to go. At least it'd be interesting? After all, what was Hogwarts really hiding if two kids could find that?

* * *

Harry attended the rest of his classes over the next few days, and added exorcising Professor Binns to his list. One period was enough to tell every first year all they needed to know about the class. Even Hermione was upset, though that _may_ have been due to being called Herman every time she raised her hand to ask a question.

If anything, Defense Against the Dark Arts was even worse. The professor's stutter was so bad he averaged eight complete sentences an hour, leaving them with a about a long paragraph of notes and information over the course of the first week. Harry didn't want to discriminate against a person with a disability, but he couldn't help but think that if your stutter was that bad, maybe you should 't try to run what appeared to be a lecture only class in front of twenty five kids.

Transfiguration had been interesting at least. For their class McGonagall had showed off her skill as an animagus, which impressed everyone to no end, Nym and Harry in particular. The girls and Neville had split the two shapeshifters up at their tables so everyone could take equal advantage of their skill, a strategy that seemed to lead to success.

Professor's McGonagall's speech about transfiguration being one of the most dangerous magics they would do at Hogwarts confused the young metamorphs, however. The going theory they were developing with Andi as part of their on-going research into themselves was that their very cells were completely impregnated with transfiguration magic. All of the research they had on other metamorphmagi in the past seemed to support the theory as well. At least as far as they could tell, organized record keeping at St. Mungos hadn't really caught on until the late 1800s, which left over two hundred years of medical history documented only by purchase receipts and the personal diary of a rather risqué nurse who served between 1650 and 1745.

The friends sat through thirty minutes of scare and safety lecture before they were each given an incantation, and a match meant to interface with a pincushion.

Harry and Nym each completed their tasks almost immediately, but in fairness it was more of an instinctual act for the pair of than any kind of real effort. Their friends weren't quite on the same level, but they weren't without hope, because Harry did have a bit of an ace up his sleeve. Well, a second ace up his sleeve. One he could share, really the first ace was more of a tattoo. The card metaphor broke down pretty quickly, so Harry abandoned that line of thought and helped his friends by sharing the wisdom of his father.

James Potter was a deft hand with transfiguration, and after ten or so years of practice, after he left the halls of Hogwarts and moved on to greener pastures, he pinned down why. Transfiguration was a magic of physical change, so while an incantation to focus one's intent was very helpful, a physical and spatial understanding of the change in question could work as an excellent substitute. The two together made perfection. If you could _see_ the match narrow, _see_ the grains merge and the shine increase and the match become metallic in front of you, if you had all of that you were a pinch of magical effort from your goal.

James Potter, by even the best recollection, had an unhealthy flair for the dramatic. He waxed poetic about his favorite discipline in his personal journals frequently, and then Lily became pregnant and his words took on a fevered tone. He was so pleased with having a son that it was all he could write about. Teaching his son transfiguration, using that skill to convert one of those cherry pies Padfoot loved so much into something a little less table, and then hiding behind his son when Lily got mad about the pie and terrified dog in the kitchen.

James Potter may have been an idiot.

When the friends finished their assignment Harry and Nym began experimenting, as they were wont to do. Only in minor direct contravention to the safety lecture they had receive fifteen minutes previously. Their challenge was to turn one match into _two_ needles, mostly to see if they could. So while most of their classmates were still working on the assignment, or in one case trying to put out the match he had accidentally lit, Harry had his wand in hand and was concentrating on a pair of dull metal sticks, and Nym was in much the same position with two beautifully formed wooden needles.

Neither were above jealously looking at the other's work before furiously returning to their own, something their teacher noted with a decidedly upturned eyebrow.

Over the course of the rest of the lesson each got closer to their goal and the rest of their friends worked on ease and speed of casting. Hermione in particular got the spell down to the work of just a few seconds, before turning to Harry with some questions.

At least that's what it looked like for a brief moment, before she saw Harry and Nym behind her blatantly ignoring Professor McGonagall's warnings about safety and just messing about directly under their teacher's nose.

She poked Harry hard in the side, prompting him to squeak quietly, and began whispering to him in an angry tone, "What do you think you are doing! The professor specifically told us not to experiment or misuse any of this magic! Stop that right now!"

For his part Harry turned to her, rubbing his side, and with relative calm, "Hermione, Nym and I have been doing this exact kind of thing for over a year now, we have the blessings of a fully qualified healer too, we—"

McGonagall's refined voice broke in from behind them, "Back to work."

Hermione shot Harry a superior look, which quickly became exasperated when he turned right back to his challenge with Nym.

At the end of the hour both made it. Harry had made it first, which meant Nym had to give up their standard forfeit and put on a pig nose. She snorted loudly at a giggleing Hannah as they packed their things.

Before they could leave Minerva called out, "Mr. Bones and Ms. Tonks, please remain behind."

The pair looked at each other guiltily, Nym morphing back to her standard forms while Hermione sniffed meaningfully at them.

"It has not escaped my notice that the two of you are metamorphmagi, as you have not been especially subtle about it, I imagine this is not a surprise. Your performance today, as well as how you each helped your friends, also did not escape my notice. Take ten points each to Hufflepuff for helping your fellows understand transfiguration. Take an additional five points each for completing your assignments first, and doing something I was not sure was possible, transfiguring your matches into two needles without a separate conjuration."

The pair shared a victorious glance.

"I would like to provide you with an additional assignment. Are you each capable of conjuring a handkerchief?"

The decidedly feline professor was met with two nods.

"Please do so."

Harry looked at Nym, Nym looked at Harry, and with a shared giggle they each conjured a handkerchief featuring a picture of the other. Harry's had Nym with a duck bill (a transformation she still had yet to master), and Nym's featured a Harry with a feminine figure and waist length pink hair. They traded when they finished.

Minerva observed the pair, and suppressing a smile, continued, "Very good, are you capable of duplicating your conjurations?"

Two more nods, followed by whispered _Gemino_ charms, and before the transfiguration mistress were four comic portraits of the students in front of her. Minerva decided to just go for broke, telling the children that what they were doing was ridiculous and impossible served no purpose. They had done it. The evidence was before her. Their year of practical self transfiguration, or perhaps competitive practical self transfigurations, had some undeniable and impressive results, but given they had three hundred sixty five days of experience and she taught each student perhaps six hours a week…

"Please transform one of your handkerchiefs into a kitten," she said with the edges of a smile creeping onto her face.

"Professor? Could you take your other form so we could get a better visual of a cat? I don't think we've seen one outside Diagon Alley in several years," Harry said, Nym nodded vigorously at his side.

She did so, allowing the students to pet her briefly, before changing back and urging them to their work. The transformation took each of them a minute, but before long there was a ginger kitten playing with a Siamese on the desk in front of them.

Minerva idly conjured a ball of yarn for the kittens to play with, before sitting down in front of the pair.

"I know you have lunch now, so why don't I call for one of the elves to bring us some sandwiches while we discuss your future in this class," she said, as a full smile graced her face.

That evening Harry crossed another goal off his list.

Defense against the Dark Arts, on the other hand, was tedious, and not only just to say in casual conversation. Seriously, Harry thought, it was a mouthful. By their second period of it, the friends had turned entirely over to referring to it as DADA, which was to say 'dee-æ-dee-æ'. The friends almost entirely lacked fathers, and didn't need to bring up their masculine parental figure issues.

Beyond how annoying Harry found the nomenclature, the Professor seemed like he may in fact need some kind of neurological therapy. Harry and Nym got to talking about it, and their first guess was that the man had some kind of advanced form of Tourette's that hindered his normal speech, and which possibly had an origin in some kind of vampire related event. His stuttering and constant physical tics left his class only a small notch higher than Binns' in terms of overall usefulness and interest.

It took one lesson with him before the Hufflepuffs showed the traits of their house and arranged a study group, inviting along their Gryffindor friends. Quirrell, aside from making Harry generally feel uneasy, and for some reason making his scars ache a little, was utterly useless.

During class Harry sat next to Hannah and both worked on their use of proper Received Pronunciation as an accent. Harry thought it was hilarious, and Hannah had small aspirations to being one of the voices that worked professionally on the Wizarding Wireless Network for their dramas.

Hermione was as angry with the group over their treatment of DADA as she was with their treatment of History of Magic and their negligence in transfiguration, most of which the friends goofed off for and then made up all of their study later on their own.

Neville and Susan stuck with Nym, who spent her time literally making faces at them. She was on a search for the most realistic face she could pull that looked like a love child of Snape and Draco.

Astronomy had turned out to just be a class, uninteresting in general because it lended no context to any of the concepts it tried to teach. Harry heard some of the older years talking about it being good because they thought, and he quoted, that 'Sinistra was a choice bird'. Harry both was a metamorph and knew a lady metamorph so looks didn't mean much to him.

* * *

As the first week ended, Harry tried to find an excuse to meet the groundskeeper again. His biological folks had been friends and said only great things about the man, covering for catching them out after hours, having them over for tea in the winter, providing some more _exotic_ ingredients from the forest, showing them the local unicorn herd, things like that.

The only problem was that Harry was Harry Bones and not Harry Potter, so that wouldn't work as an excuse. Harry still wasn't one hundred percent on how manners worked in the magical world, but something told him that walking up to the guy and straight asking him how he got to be nine feet tall wasn't polite. As far as he knew, Harry didn't even have anything in common with the giant of a man, so he resolved to keep his ear to the ground about the guy, his curiosity overwhelming him.

Nym thought he was strange for being curious and caring, and Harry couldn't offer her a reason why he wasn't. Harry was just obsessed with self-transfiguration, even if he spent most of his time in at least ninety percent of his base form. Being nine feet tall would be hard for him, and he was constructed on a base level to be whatever he wanted to be. Someone who was that way naturally was curious!

As it turned out, he didn't have to wait too long. During breakfast Friday morning a strange owl found its way to the table of the badgers, plopping down with no small amount of exasperation in front of Harry. The owl looked like it had seen better days, but it also lacked the age for that to be a real thing. A number of its feather seemed to be bent the wrong direction, and its head was at a permanent fifteen degree angle relative to the ground which Harry was fairly sure was not normal.

Harry knew the avian form very well, aside from their collected desire to be canine, birds were the second form he and Nym had been working on. The transformations were impossible, or at least impossible to survive, if they didn't understand the bone structure, the routes of the blood vessels, and the placement of the nerve endings so their study led to at least a greater than average understanding of owls. Harry gently took his wand and placed it at the bird's neck and began channeling energy into the bird, exercising something he, Susan, and Hannah had discovered in the woods surrounding the Bones Manor.

Magical animals had a lot of magic inside themselves, and that magic knew what they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do. It was why anything magical was remarkably more resilient that it's mundane counterpart. Magicals had magic inside them telling their bodies that they are supposed to work better, or keep working, essentially telling and forcing their body to just shrug off what would incapacitate a non-magical, like a kind of biological inertia it kept magicals going longer and stronger than they otherwise had any right to. By channeling raw power into a post owl, a magical owl, Harry knew he could give its internal magic a bit of extra oomph in enforcing how it's body was supposed to be, if it was to be healthy.

The owl in front of him straightened it neck with a wince inducing crack, and looked around with significantly more acuity than had been present before. It preened for a moment, and gave Harry's fingers a small affectionate nip. Harry smiled as he petted the owl.

After a few minutes of the owl soaking up some love and attention from the Hufflepuff crowd it scuffled down the table back to Harry and stuck out its leg, which had a small scroll attached. Harry laughed as he relieved the owl of its burden. It had been so enamored with the attention it got that it forgot to do its job! The scroll was written in a large and messy hand, and it politely asked Harry to drop by when he didn't have classes in the afternoon. Hagrid had heard alongside most of the country that he had a phoenix as a familiar and wanted to meet one in person (Dumbledore was evidently stingy about letting people meet his fabled companion).

Harry leaned back from his spot on the bench and found Hagrid's eyes up at the staff table. With a wave and a thumbs up, Harry secured an afternoon tea date for himself and Hedwig. In retrospect, he suspected that Hedwig's flared wings and joyful cry may have had something to do with it.

Hedwig had adapted quickly to life in the castle. As a truly bound familiar, she kept on Harry's shoulder nearly all the time during his classes. Professor Snape had looked as though he wanted to raise a stink about its presence in the potion's lab, but Harry was legally entitled to having his favorite immortal bird with him at all times by an embarrassing number of laws and statutes. Hedwig was family after all, and Harry wouldn't allow anyone to separate him from his family, or messed with them. Beyond all of that, she was still a newborn phoenix, and had yet to have even her first burning day. She seemed to be maturing at an abnormally slow rate by phoenix standards, and in fact she seemed to be at or near where Harry was developmentally, seemingly not advancing any further than he did. No one in the family (or their two new friends) was sure what to make of it, for that matter the few unspeakables still interested also didn't appear to know what was up, but perhaps Hagrid who was said to have immense knowledge of magical creatures and their care could shed some light on everything.

Harry slogged through his day, passing securely through History of Magic without gaining anything from the lecture, and moving toward his afternoon tea. When class ended he packed his text in a hurry and after pausing to gather Nym and Neville, set off for the small cottage on the edge of the forbidden forest.

As they drew nearer to the edge of the cottage, Harry had to pause to look at the forest. It felt strange to him. Actually just the fact that he could feel it struck him as weird. It was something like his wand and Hogwarts. His wand was sweet, but it was like water. It could flow and move, and it could crush and smother and drown, it was fast power. Hogwarts was _old_. It was knowledge, and warmth and love. This forest was dark. It had secrets. It wasn't even that it felt unwelcoming, but it felt like you definitely had to earn entrance to it.

Or Harry could be crazy. All things considered, the odds were about fifty-fifty on that one.

The three kids knocked on the great wooden door to the hut, and as soon as knuckle hit wood an incredible barking could be heard from the other side of the door.

"Back Fang! Calm down ye great beast! I asked them kids here, no need ter be crazy! Down boy!"

The door cracked open to reveal one small eye set into a massive face, and a curious snout easily the size of Harry's head.

"Ah! Great ter see ye here! I don't have a clock in here me self, so I weren't quite sure if it was the right time yet," The door opened further, and the biggest dog any of them had ever seen bounded out and began sniffing them, "Fang here is always happy to have company. He's a big softy, you'll love'im. And ye brought Hedwig with ye! Fantastic! I'm glad you were interested in coming down ter meet me. Not a lot of folks willing to spend time with an old groundskeeper like me. I knew most of your folks when they passed through here. Amelia was a nice lady, so were Andromeda and that Ted Tonks fella when she brought him 'round. And I'll never forget Alice and Frank as long as I live."

He beamed down at the first years from his lofty perch, easily four or more feet above each of their heads.

They followed the massive man inside his house, Fang following Nym who took the rear. When they got inside, Hagrid directed them to chairs round his table. Everything in the house was built to a larger scale than the kids were used to, but they soon found comfortable places. Hedwig hopped from Harry's shoulder to the table with a quick flap, and Fang rested his massive head in Nyms lap. Having quickly taken a shine to the young witch.

"Ah, such a beautiful bird, aren't ya?." Hagrid said, as he used one of his massive fingers to scratch at the spot just at the back of her head, causing contented cooing to fill the room.

"Do you know much about phoenixes, Hagrid? Hedwig doesn't seem to be growing as fast as other phoenixes we've read about. We're not sure if something is wrong, or if there's just something we don't know about them. They're rather rare, and Hedwig isn't much help."

Hagrid switched his scratching to just beneath her beak and was quiet for a bit before he responded, "I don't rightly know. Like a lot of magical creatures thy don't much care 'bout human things. Think they just like bein' mysterious meself. I can tell ya this though, if'n sommat were wrong she'd let ya know. If she's happy, I reckon she's fine."

Nym was slowly morphing her face to match Fang's, while Harry and Neville began just chit chatting with their new friend.

They learned that Hagrid had been around for a long time. The tiny giant even reminisced somewhat bitterly about how he had been the one to pick 'Harry Potter' up from the ruins in Godric's Hollow, and he had taken him to the Dursleys in a flying motorcycle. That moment answered a number of questions about motorcycle based pain hallucinations from his youth, he couldn't hold it against Hagrid. Harry, having exchanged more than six words with him, firmly believed that Hagrid was the most earnest man he would ever meet in his life. Especially since he couldn't do it publicly right then, Harry laid the blame at the doorstep of his esteemed headmaster.

The kids questions managed to pull out of Hagrid that he had gone to Hogwarts, but had been expelled in his fourth year over a misunderstanding. Hagrid went very quiet when he was asked what happened, but he was clear that he had never been charged with anything. Talking about his time in the school, his face took on a wistful cast. He remembered magic, and if his face was any kind of tell (Harry suspected that Hagrid was a lousy poker player) he had loved every minute of learning magic.

Then, in his youthful curiosity, Harry asked a rather fateful question, "Hagrid, why don't you use a wand?"

"What's that then?"

"Well, you do a lot of work around the grounds, and I mean I haven't been here long, but I've never once seen you use a wand. You were digging trenches for the sixth year Care for Magical Creatures class on Wednesday, and you were doing it by hand. I guess I was just curious why you didn't use a wand."

The large man blinked owlishly, and Harry guessed his cheeks had colored, though it was hard to tell beneath the beard, "Well when ye get expelled, they snap yer wand, didn't they?"

"But you just said you were never convicted of anything. You said it was a misunderstanding. Why couldn't you just get another one? I know it's been a long time since you studied magic, but you're a nice guy. I can tell that and I just met you. Besides, Hedwig," The phoenix inclined her head in Harry's direction, "Is an amazing judge of character, if she likes you there's nothing else to be said. I'm sure Professor Flitwick wouldn't mind helping you learn a bit more. McGonagall too! I bet if you put some effort into it, you could even get your OWLs done."

Hagrid looked away into the distance, probably lost in a memory of his time inside the halls of the school instead of out. He shook his head, his great mane of hair flailing about him.

"Nah, they'd never let me get another."

"Hagrid, what if I were to tell you I knew a fool-proof way to get you one? If you were never convicted then all you need to do is have a sponsor to go get one. If you swear an oath of service to a lord you could get one today.

The man paused in his scratching while he thought, a gentle trill from Hedwig reminded him of his duty and he began again, "Well, I dunno. Who's this lord fella that'd sponsor me? Why would anyone want ter sponsor me in getting a wand?"

Harry smiled, "Maybe because a phoenix he is friends with thinks pretty highly of you. Or possibly because he thinks you're one of the most trustworthy people he could ever hope to know?"

Harry placed his hand in the center of the table, or as close as he could get (it was half-giant scale after all), and with a meaningful look allowed the house rings he wore to phase back into the visible spectrum. Hagrid noticed the rings and his eyes widened comically.

"Wha'? But tha's—"

"Yeah, ridiculous, I know! I mean I'm eleven years old, what the hell, right? But it does mean I can help you."

The much larger man looked from Harry to his rings and back, before running a hand through his beard and slowly nodding.

Hagrid went to Diagon Alley that weekend with a missive written by the duly appointed master of Gryffindor house (Hagrid had been a Gryff in his days in Hogwarts and requested to be bonded to that house. Harry privately felt the man should have been in Hufflepuff, but either way the man got a wand so everyone was happy), releasing funds and ordering whoever saw the writ to ensure his man was properly equipped on the authority of House Gryffindor.


	9. Troll Time

Chapter Eight: Troll Time

* * *

To his extreme boredom and chagrin, Harry's life calmed down for the next month or so. Flying lessons went smoothly for the friends. Harry, Nym, Susan and Hannah were all old hands at broom handling, so they made sure to care for Neville and Hermione as they started flying. With their support the nervous magicals soon found flying to be relatively safe and fun, as long as Harry and Nym weren't dive bombing one another.

There was a minor uproar in the school's population as a whole when the _Prophet_ announced a break-in to Gringotts. Harry was quick to send an owl to the bank noting his continued faith in their security. One of the things that Amelia had drilled mercilessly into the kids was that Goblins were warriors, most just mounted their axes on the wall behind their desks and began using interest rates and mortgage terms in place of the old shield and crossbow. After a breach of their security, they appreciated having a re-affirmation from an ally. Amelia had been quick to do the same, though on her part it had just a smidge more to do with avoiding a potential treaty violation.

As the break-in faded from the news the whole first year had themselves a laugh at their more… rambunctious members.

Draco Malfoy managed to goad Ron Weasley into a dramatic midnight duel to be held in the trophy room. Everyone soon learned that he had never shown, and just used it as an opportunity to get the redhead caught by the caretaker Filch. The 'Puffs were far enough removed from both sides to enjoy the whole experience, it was a clever move and an amusing way to get back at Ronald Weasley, who constantly acted like a royal prat proving that the whole pureblood arrogance thing wasn't limited to the green and silver crowd.

Part of the amusement surrounding the whole thing was the fact that Weasley had run from Filch and headed into the third floor corridor that Dumbledore had said was forbidden. He claimed to have seen a massive three headed dog, with his two friends Thomas and Finnegan who had gone to back him up in the duel confirming the story. It seemed an idiotic way to get attention.

Harry and the group all didn't believe that Dumbledore and the rest of the staff would honestly be stupid enough to let a three headed guard dog around a bunch of kids who were each would-be vandals and arsonists running about with deadly weapons on their best days.

Harry's time was well claimed by exploring the possibilities of Rowena's secret room full of research and his studies. He was using his father and mother's advice from their journals to good effect in all of his classes, their work putting him and his friends months ahead of their year group. His transfigurations were made from excellent visualizations and his charms were powerful and controlled, but the one place where he jumped ahead of not only his year group but also his friends was in their individual study of DADA.

Spells just clicked for him. In the back of his mind, from somewhere near where he and Hedwig traded feelings and thoughts, the voices of a dozen auguries whispered quietly at him. It freaked him out more than a little, but harry keenly recalled the words of the sorting hat, and he took them to heart.

The almost wordless voices directed his arm a little higher as he learned the _petrificus totalis_ , resulting in truer aim. They nudged the jab in his smokescreen spell a little, making the result billow and the practice room much faster. When Harry got cocky and tried the reductor curse, they fairly shouted a smaller and curvier movement into his ear, letting him pull off a fifth year spell in the first place.

The first through third year 'Puffs all meet in the common room at the same time and studied together in most subjects, but when they got around to DADA, Harry's spells began attracting fourth and fifth years to come into the group. Susan had seen his wand selection and so knew something about it's being unique. She hadn't given it a second thought until a fifth year called Harry onto the dueling platform to 'see what he had in him'. They started and harry chose to simply advance on his foe, calmly, and with an expression that caused the boy four years his senior to feel a pinch of doubt.

The fifth year called out _Expelliarmus_ , and Harry didn't blink as the red jet of light passed harmlessly over his right shoulder. A flick, and _Diffindo_ , met the _Incarcerous_ on its way to him, and without dropping his sedate pace a _protego_ the size of a hand neatly deflected the tickling jinx sent his way.

The ickle firstie stood halfway to his opponent's starting position, and paused for a moment. _Finite_ cancelled _Impedimentia_ , _Protego_ met _Verdimillio duo_ , and then the older dueller began to feel nervous. _StupefyStupefyStupefy_ forced Harry to dodge, and then to begin running. In an instant he was on top of the older Hufflepuff who panicked and called out the first thing to pass through his mind. _Reducto!_ Drew gasps from all of the watchers.

Harry had been leading with his wand, and when the violent pulse left his opponent's wand the whispers in the back of his head drew his aim _upupupleftdownleft_ and Harry whispered his own _stupefy_. The red light scarcely left the tip of his wand when the incoming blue light crashed into it, redirecting upward just as the stunner was shot down. In a trice the fifth year was wrapped in rope, stunned, and disarmed.

No one blinked. Finally after a beat of silence Nym called Harry a cheater for using his abilities as a metamorph to artificially increase his flexibility and muscle mass. The pre-teen had the grace to blush.

By the time it was rolling around to November, even with his defense practice, Harry was edging toward extremely bored. He had plenty to occupy his attention, but at two months none of it was new anymore. None of it was groundbreaking. Harry honestly couldn't remember ever having been this impatient before, he had years of living in a cupboard to fall back on for training in patience. It was a very recent change in him, he wasn't sure if the girls even really noticed it. In a moment of deep reflection, he realized they had only known him for two years. They didn't not know him well enough to spot it.

He was certain it wasn't the castle, Hedwig, his new friends, or the food. He had actually heard from his Elvin friends that on occasion the staff laced the food with calming draughts and contraceptive potions, out of respect they offered to make sure his food was clean. The only thing he could figure it being was what Valentino the hat had mentioned (and why in the hell did he insist in the inclusion of 'the hat' in his name?), which was the whispering from his wand. They had been coming out more and more in his practice, which was troubling.

It was hard to pin down, but without a real parallel he could draw from his own experience, he could only describe feelings near what it was. His blood was _itching_. It was a restlessness. He needed to do something new, something to get a little adrenaline flowing. It felt like something deep inside him was woken up by the feeling of dueling, and it wanted to be let out to run around a bit. Two months of library work, mild exploring, and mostly being inside figuring out magic wasn't doing it for him anymore.

Then it was Samhain.

That morning was charms, a class that they shared with the red and gold kids to the friend's chagrin. They did their level best to not buy into the whole house stereotype thing, but even Harry who was nominally responsible either to or for the house by virtue of being it's true heir had to admit that the whole bunch seemed totally consumed by the 'Gryffindors charge forward' idea. The Hufflepuff contingent were beginning to realize that the snakes told the lions what to do, the ravens told the lions how to do it, and when everything fell to pieces the badgers came in and took care of everything. Inevitably the lions ended up in the hospital wing, the ravens ended up crying in the library, and the snakes fell to political in-fighting.

In any case, the quarter-Goblin professor had paired each badger with a lion, and they were all working on the wizard's best friend, the levitation charm. The friends had been practicing it since they first met on the Express, and despite what a sixth year had nailed down as wand compatibility issues between Neville and his father's wand, everything was going smoothly. The only issue of any significance was Ron Weasley, prat-boy extraordinaire, who had been paired with Hannah. She diligently tried to get the troll in human form to levitate a feather, with sadly predictable results.

After a solid class filled with failure and abuse from the boy she was helping was beginning to weigh on the normally sunny and quiet girl, thankfully when the period finally let out the Gryffindors packed in a rush and fled the room, allowing the friends time to pack and leave at their leisure. When they entered the hallway, Weasley's voice could be heard floating back to the group, actually questioning the parentage of the girl who had spent an hour and a half teaching him to flick his wand and pronounce two words in pseudo-latin.

Hannah was known for her even keel. When the Bones had first adopted Harry, she fulfilled the classic Hufflepuff role: keeping to the back, and doing all she could to help. She was practically inseparable from Susan, but she was the support behind Susan's exuberance. She encouraged Neville, listened patiently to Hermione, and glared at anything females that so much as glance at Harry with Nym. It made her happy, it was what she did.

Right now, she was red in the face, and only the furious whispers of the other four girls, and quiet support of the two guys kept her from running off to curse the idiot and cry.

Harry, Nym, and Neville exchanged glances. One way or another the problem would be solved. The group headed out to the open greenhouse, which was Hannah and Neville's favorite place to burn time in the castle. Hannah loved sitting in the flower beds nearest the house elf's beekeeping area. Neville loved flowers, and though he would never admit it, being near Hannah.

Lunch rolled around and a whispered request saw a plate of sandwiches popped to them by an elf. The friends skipped out on the DADA lesson which would have filled their afternoon, reasoning that not only had Quirrell yet to give a detention, but the man had never given any indication that he knew who any of his students were. He was often lucky to solidly deliver more than half a dozen sentences in a single period.

By the time they had to get up for the feast Hannah had thoroughly decompressed and was lit from within by her normal understated smiles. The friends dusted themselves free of dirt (an involved process for Neville, who had replanted a few sun-lion-flowers to fresher soil, conveniently nearer where Hannah sat) and moved to the great hall.

The Hufflepuff table sat just to one side of the center line in the hall. To its side lay the table of the lions, and across the aisle lay the Ravenclaw and Slytherin tables. The friends took seats at their table and prepared themselves for the house elve's finest efforts. As more students came in the noise level in the hall rose, and before long lighter fair, the hors d'oeurves, appeared. It was beautiful, and tasty, and as it happened around him Harry just felt impatient and bittersweet. This was his first real anniversary of the day his parents died. He could distract himself with classes and helping a friend, but now? Now he was sitting in the middle of the girl's conversation in the great hall. Now he was supposed to be celebrating a druidic high-holiday. And now the headmaster stood at his podium, saying words Harry didn't listen to about sacrifice and the Potters, and all around him students raised a glass to him. And his dead parents

For an instant, as noise picked back up and students returned to the joy and their meals, for an instant bittersweet became just bitter.

He had a lot. So much more than most, but for all he had, he had no hope of ever even fully understanding what he had lost when he was one. Journals were nice, but they weren't the people who wrote them.

Then the jolly atmosphere and dark cloud over his head were both disrupted when the massive doors to the great hall were slammed against the wall by the entrance of Professor Quirrell.

"TROLL! Troll in the dungeon! Thought you ought to know," The be-turbaned speaker passing straight out as he completed his statement.

There was a beat of silence before the hall exploded into panic. Harry watched as Draco Malfoy actually hugged one of the monkeys he had following him in fear, on the other side of the table Susan, Nym, and Hermione were caught between panic and laughter as they watch Weasley do the same thing to one of the chocolate cakes on the table in front of them. Seemed like the kid turned to food in his panic, who knew?

A series of cannon blasts erupted from the wand of the headmaster at the front of the room, followed by a voice Harry recognized the familiar distortions of a _sonorus_ charm on, "CALM DOWN!" with peace, or dominance, thus established, "Prefects will lead their charges to their common rooms, seventh years lead the way, the staff will go to confront the beast."

The Gryffs charged the door, followed closely by the 'Claws. The badger and snake contingents shared dubious glances. Their common rooms were in the dungeons.

Harry felt a call from his wand, exciting the uneasy buzzing that had been running through his blood the past few days. The buzzing ramped up exponentially until Harry's mind lit up like a christmas tree, and in a moment he made up his mind. The 'Puffs and the snakes were walking into troll territory. They could get hurt. He couldn't allow that. So. Come sunrise, there'd be a shrunken troll's head mounted on the inside of his trunk, or his blood would stop buzzing as he cooled off in the hospital wing.

Hufflepuffs milled uncertainly around their table, and amidst the uncertainty Harry closed his eyes in concentration and with as much focus as he could muster began changing himself. He increased his bone and muscle density, and knocked the production of adrenaline into gear and the natural production of endorphins up a few notches. Silently he thanked two years of competition and the printers of all the mundane biology texts he had consumed alongside Nym. Then he was off, almost bluring as he vaulted the table and sped to one of the few entrances to the dungeons proper.

When he closed with the stairs he was looking for, Harry started thinking. He was hunting troll. Quirrell, despite having not stuttered for once in his life, hadn't passed on any useful information, he could be looking at forest, mountain, or god forbid, swamp. They were all difficult to hurt, let alone kill, but the horns on a swamp troll were known for the venom they secreted, and how it resisted all common wound cleaning and closing magic. One thing all trolls had in common though, regardless of species or whether or not they were just hosed off with industrial solvents, was the fact that they smelled like something had died a week ago and no one bothered to clean up.

He used his study of the canine form to make a few changes to his nasal cavity, increasing his sensitivity to smell. A few hallways of searching found him a smell that burned in his nostrils, and with his metabolism screaming treason and murder from how much energy he was burning through, he went off. His nose led him through, then out of the dungeons and onto the first floor. It seemed like the defense teacher was just as bad with directions as he was at lecturing, the troll was in the school proper, and seemed to be poking around the entrance to the east wing.

Harry's blood was filled with delicious reflex enhancing chemicals, screaming for him to take on what looked like a full grown mountain troll. A small part of his mind, buried somewhere deeply in the back, seemed to think this whole thing was a bad idea. The parts occupied by a connection to a phoenix and the haunted whispers of the spirit of his wand both informed it that it was to shut its useless hole.

As he spotted it near the ladies room Harry's wand began a complicated pattern, whispers of _bombarda-reducto-diffindo-defodio_ in a number of different combinations spilling from his mouth as he ran down the long hall towards the beast. Harry had read through most of the complete works of Newt Scamander when he had first gotten Hedwig's egg, so he had a good idea that the best efforts of an eleven year old would glance off the troll's skin at worst and make in angry at best. He wasn't wrong.

His spells looked like they stung the troll, his gouging spell putting small bloody pockmarks into its hide while the rest seemed to merely annoy, but they worked perfectly for the plan he was still making up. It turned in his direction, and moving its bulk to face him properly, slowly raising its club for a massive overhand strike.

Harry kept up his litany of low-level offensive spells as he got closer and closer. The club rushed down to meet him as he finally entered it range, the strength of the troll generating a physical wind bearing down behind the immense piece of wood.

Just as the club was about to make contact, Hedwig enacted her portion of the impormptu plan. A burst of white fire enveloped the eleven year old as a keening filled the air, at the same moment another burst appeared in the air behind the troll, releasing a young phoenix and a small but dense boy at the same speed they entered from. Harry hit the back of the troll's head feet first, snapping it forward with the stomach churning crunch of injured vertebrae.

The troll was thoroughly concussed and severely over balanced, it crashed forward onto the ground, its club skidding from his hand and impacting hard on the wall of the hallway.

Harry placed his wand to the base of the Troll's skull, and made no incantation. He focused the iron hard will honed by nights of starvation and days of fight and flight to a sharp point, and channeled magic through his wand with one single thought. _CUT_.

* * *

Twenty minutes later a group of Professors ran onto the scene. Flitwick led the group, a dueler's shield flowing dimly around his off hand, his wand held lightly in an arm that spoke of whip-snap movement. Behind him was Professor McGonagall, a conjured marble golem in front of her and two transfigured wolves flanking her. They too had the idea to follow the smell of the troll to its location, but had followed the trail at a significantly lowered pace.

The smell had gotten more and more intense as they closed on the hallway, and as they rounded the corner into the hall way they stopped dead, stunned by the sight in front of them.

Harry was standing next to a wall with a house elf next to him. He was munching on a piece of what Flitwick recognized as baklava while floated the severed head of the troll into different orientations around a shield of wood stuck to the stone, evidently finding an ideal way to display his new trophy. The troll's cauterized stump as well as the rest of its body lay flat out in the hallway behind him, and as they approached closer they caught the end of a conversation.

"...I dunno Slippy, I still think I should just stick it plainly at the back."

"No, no, no, Harry. Slippy did this for old headmaster, two headmasters ago. Proper way is to angle it, so face always looks down and in fear."

"But it won't be mounted on a wall, I'm gonna shrink it and put it on the inside of the lid to my trunk. If I angle it down it'll look weird. And changing its expression just seems disrespectful."

"Well you didn't tell Slippy that! Yes, use your sticky magic, Slippy will shrink for you. Also, yous mounting cut-off head of creature to inside of your trunk and you worried about disrespecting creature?"

"Good point, and thanks, mate," he said with a sheepish smile, "And thanks for the snack too," He said, hefting the mass of sticky desert in his other hand, "When I tweak my body chemistry you wouldn't believe the energy I burn. Could you have a plate brought to me later too? I dunno if I can last until breakfast. Oh hi professors!"

Harry smiled at his teachers brightly, their slack jawed stares at him broken only when Slippy finished her work and popped away.

The scot was the first to gather a small portion of her wits, "Mr. Bones, what... I mean, how..?

Harry looked at them, a playful and satisfied gleam in his eye, "What? It could have hurt my friends."

* * *

Before long, Harry found himself called in front of the headmaster with Professors Sprout, McGonagall, and for some reason, Snape in tow. Harry didn't want to be here, he found the old man suspicious, annoying on a personal level (he was privately convinced that whatever made his eyes twinkle had to be some form of dark magic), and it was not magically or physically possible for harry to have greater doubts about the man's intention towards the person of one Harry Potter. Everyone save Sprout he could really take or leave.

On the other hand, Hedwig loved meeting Fawkes and being near him. From the impression Harry got from Hedwig, Fawkes was a lot like his companion. Dour, old, and possibly in need of a beating on general principle. She adored being in the old man's office because it gave her an opportunity to bother the hell out of the older bird by trying to share his stand, eating his food, or generally making a nuisance of herself. It wasn't often Harry could deny his companion anything.

"Harry, my boy, could you explain why you were found next to the body of a decapitated mountain troll, evidently mounting the head on a plaque with the help of a house elf?"

Harry was _sorely_ tempted to say he was engaging in the business of an ancient and noble house (because ancient and noble houses traditionally di a lot of business with trolls in girls bathroom's after hours). He really did love doing that. Laws were ridiculously unfair in regards to the old families and, legally, he didn't even have to identify which one he was working in the interests of. Wouldn't due for some pureblood prince to have to answer to the aurors after all. It was so stupid he couldn't help but love it. Sadly this wasn't the time.

"Well, you sent everyone off to their common rooms, but for the Slytherins and us Hufflepuff folk, our common rooms are in the dungeons that the troll was supposed to be in. Then every professor left all of us under the command of the prefects, who despite their authority are just students. I don't mean to brag," Snape looked like he was about to have a stroke at that, "but I'm very good at defense, between what I know from visiting the DMLE, what I know about anatomy, and the beautiful phoenix who is nice enough to follow me around I saw a way to both ensure the protection of everyone important to me and to expand my knowledge with practical experience. Besides, my mum taught me well, if you can do something in a dangerous situation to fix things, you do it."

Around the room the professors traded unreadable looks. Even Snape had something other than spite and his trademark scowl on his face, evidently the headmaster ordering the one group of people he actually cared about into danger didn't sit well. For his part, the headmaster sat behind his desk, unruffled and twinkling like the madman he was.

"Well, be that as it may, I must ask what spell you used to decapitate a fully grown mountain troll. That knowledge is not part of any of our curriculum, and assuming it is not dark magic of some kind is something that most assuredly must be shared for the greater good."

Harry smiled, now there was a statement he could really respond to.

"I'm sorry sir, that is a family secret."

The headmaster frowned at his cheek, and for an instant Harry felt pressure in his head. Unbidden, the memory of running at the troll rose in his mind's eye, with an intense focus on his wand and the spells he cast. The pressure seemed to press out from within, trigger an intense headache and pain behind his eyes, then Harry heard an enraged… hoot? What?

From her perch next to Fawkes, Hedwig cried out and flashed to right in front of the headmaster's face, catching is beard and all of his hair alight. Snape immediately reacted, shooting an _Augamenti_ off at the older man, quenching the blaze, as the other professors looked stupefied at the phoenix, now snuggled firmly in Harry's arms.

There was a _very_ heavy silence before Harry spoke out in a clipped tone.

"Sir, I know you didn't just try to use legilimency on the head of a Most Ancient and Noble House. I know that because if the Supreme Mugwump," Harry briefly thanked whatever gods were listening for his mum's desire for them to be exposed to everything the magical world had to offer, as well as her two weeks of hurried tutoring when they found out who he was, "tried anything like that he would lose his position faster than he could blink. I also know that because, if memory serves, there is actually a provision in the by-laws of the wizengamot that allows for the Chief Warlock to be literally drawn and quartered if he was caught doing so. I may be eleven, but being too young for occlumency doesn't mean I'm without friends looking out for me. I think I'm going to leave now."

Harry turned to see two extremely irate witches, each of whom had evidently picked up on his not-so-subtle hints and were not pleased with their conclusions. A brief but leisurely mental conversation later, Hedwig flamed out of the room, taking Harry directly to the Hufflepuff common area.

Harry flashed in just inside the entry to the common room, and unfortunately directly in the line of sight of what appeared to be a firing squad of angry female relations and friends. Neville stood behind the line, and upon seeing his friend unscathed, began smiling and fighting off laughter. Harry quickly asked Hedwig to flash them away, only to be laughed at as she flashed herself out to the grounds to go visit Hagrid.

"Traitor," Harry whispered, taking in just how much trouble he was in, and reflecting that he was doing better back in Dumbledore's office.


	10. Aftermath and Stuff

Chapter Nine: Aftermath and Stuff

* * *

Amelia Bones was an angry witch. She considered herself a top-notch administrator, a solid auror, an excellent lover when the occasion called, and an all-around powerful magic user. She had worked hard as the head of the DMLE, and after years of effort, she firmly believed that justice would always have a place here in magical Britain.

Which was why she was pissed, sitting in her office after hours with a half full bottle of Ogden's finest. It was Halloween, and she had yet to make a damn millimeter of progress on getting her fiancé out of jail. If that weren't enough, despite everything she had uncovered with her son's account manager, she couldn't begin to lay charges at the door of the man responsible for his years of suffering.

For Sirius, Amelia had firm evidence that her man was innocent. After a decade of questioning his conviction and not believing the status quo, she finally had proof! The problem was that in order to reopen the case, she needed to drag it in front of her bosses in the Wizengamot. Through established routine and the Wizengamot charter, she needed to present all of the case files, the new evidence, and the prisoner in question at the same time to open it as 'old business'.

Of course every one of the case files were in secure holding in the records department, sealed by the Chief Warlock. She could go in and see them, but they were warded against copy and could not be removed without the Warlock's personal authorization. It was idiotic, she could look at the files, compare evidence, confirm everything, but she couldn't actually do anything while the files were sealed. She had even gone as far as physically going to Azkaban herself, where the warden of the prison refused her visitation rights on the order of, you guessed it, the Chief Warlock.

The obvious solution was to just go to the Chief Warlock, but in this case the Chief Warlock was the same man that had thrown her husband-to-be in jail with no evidence or trial. Sure, she could try, but asking the great and powerful Dumbledore would tip her hand, and for a man of his influence arranging an 'accident' at a prison notorious for its poor conditions would be beyond trivial. Ol' albus wasn't even the only person with a vested interest in keeping the Black heir behind bars. Amelia, even as a student, had felt something was off with the headmaster, but now? After Harry and this business with Sirius? Amelia had a little bit more than suspicion regarding the man who she now thought of as 'that bearded twinkly-eyed bastard'.

The additions to the charter, as well as 'binding traditions' that defined how she had to prosecute these cases were a collection of changes made over the centuries by a score of people who were each tailoring the rules to suit their own needs. It was, as she and Andi often bemoaned, just more pureblood voodoo. If they didn't have so much invested here, if she didn't have Sirius here, if Ted wasn't buried or their kids raised on these shores, that had talked about moving to the colonies or down to Oz or something. Word was, there was less of the pureblood voodoo that made both of their jobs so much harder.

She had spent two weeks finding out how she couldn't just introduce exonerating evidence and get her man free again. Not even just for her sake, but the sake of her son. Two weeks wasted. The only reason she hadn't broken down and hexed the living daylights out of every gleefully uncooperative member of the records office was the same reason why she hadn't know these procedures before now. She worked hard to get the right man, and during her tenure in this position she had yet to have to overturn a case. She did things by the book, as crooked as it was.

She had spent the last six weeks working through two hundred years of laws, charter amendments, rulings, and in several cases plain old decrees. The magic user in her refused to accept that there was no solution, where there was a wand there was a way, but her work had revealed a maze that would drive a man with the stubbornness of a stone to give up, and even the heartiest genius to their knees. For the gods' sake, a number of the laws and loopholes depended on lunar and solar arrangements!

She just didn't have the time to keep this up. She had aurors and solicitors booked for a week straight following the three day break for All Hallows Eve. A small bitter part of her acknowledged that even Sirius, as carefree and rebellious as he had been (WAS, WILL BE, she had to remind herself), he would have been angry with her for spending two months neglecting her job for him. She hated that her time was legitimately too valuable to commit so fully to any one project like that. She had one last recourse, but it was an equivalent to the non-magical nuclear option.

She could go to the Goblins.

On a pad in front of her, slightly obscured by bottle and glass, was a pad with two clearly marked sides, Pro and Con.

Pro:

Goblins literally warriors of red tape

Harry's account assures best service

Possibility of _team_ working on problem

Possibility of Goblins finding way to ironclad adoption

Odds of snapping and murdering Dumbledore lower

Odds of Goblin stabbing Dumbledore higher

Con:

Possibility of non-humans destabilizing Ministry of Magic

Odds of Goblin stabbing Dumbledore higher (see above)

Amelia sighed and placed her head in her hands. This was the kind of thing that made her think even magic couldn't stop her from dying early of stress. Dark wizards had nothing to do with it. Her life would be claimed by stress and paper work before her reflexes died enough for some jumped up wanker to get the drop on her.

The poor woman spent the rest of the night finishing the bottle, and thinking on her issues. She wanted her fiancé back. She wanted her son's godfather back. She wanted... well she wanted a lot. Eventually, she fell asleep on her desk.

At noon the next day, there was a knock on her door that woke her. In a rush she cast a low powered _incendio_ at the paper with her list, and hurried swept the empty bottle and glass into a space expanded drawer.

"Come!"

The door opened, revealing the lined and oddly leonine countenance of Rufus Scrimgeour, head auror. The man stuck his head into the room, and with a curious sounding snort, stepped into the room.

"Long night, Amelia?"

"How did you know?" she responded, looking around her office. She may have been wearing the same robe as yesterday, but her office looked impeccable. She had taken care of the booze, and she had personally charmed her office to suppress odors of alcohol and not allow clothes to wrinkle. This wasn't the first time she had to take comfort at the bottom of a bottle during a long investigation. Amelia felt bittersweet for a moment. That particular set of spells she had actually picked up from Sirius before everything had gone to hell.

Rufus tapped his left cheek knowingly, and Amelia felt her face, only to find she had fell asleep on top of her quill, which had stuck to her cheek.

"Bugger."

Rufus smiled, "I'd chide you for your language, but I have a feeling you're going to be saying that again today."

Her face took on a concerned cast immediately. Things didn't get to her desk by being minor concerns.

"No, no, no, nothing that can destroy society before two, you remember the rule. No, this one is something that your son did. I remember H, good kid, I didn't know he had it in him, but..."

Rufus trailed off as he handed a file to the witch behind the desk, only for her to glance through it, and put her head in her hands again, "Gods damn it kid. This is why we can't have nice things."

"We got the report from McGonagall a few hours ago. Seems like she had to report it as deputy headmistress. I guess we should expect this kind of stuff from a kid with a phoenix, lord knows Dumbledore causes enough trouble. It looks like your son killed the troll completely on his own, assisted by his phoenix only. From the traces Flitwick picked up, it looks like he was running through a set of standard mid-range spells before he managed to decapitate it. I probably don't have to say it, but every spell he used was at least third year, and not even I know a spell strong enough to behead a troll in one go, that's counting dipping into some of the darker stuff I've seen."

Amelia's hands never left her face, as if she thought not being able to see the paper would make the report go away. If he didn't know better, Rufus would have sworn he heard her whispering vows to look at the adoption papers again and see if she couldn't do something about them. He took a seat in front of her desk, and waited.

Five minutes of bemoaning her fate later, Amelia was ready to go.

"Can I borrow Kingsley? He knows the kid and is more than enough to take care of this."

"Sure, but I'd rather just come with you," he responded as she stood to gather her coat, "I want to tell the kid to be careful personally. Much more of this and he'll find himself with an Order of Merlin."

As she left her office she scoffed, "Like he needs the encouragement. Kid's enough trouble as is, stupid loving your children."

* * *

Harry woke up early, having set an alarm charm for considerably before breakfast. His sister, two closest friends, and two newer friends had all been... displeased... with him the night before.

Susan and Hannah had gone for classic expression of sadness, worry and disappointment. Nym had physically assaulted him, which Harry felt was the best of the response he had gotten. Hermione had managed to quote, in one breath, every one of the eleven rules, traditions, statutes, and provisos he had broken. They were the worst.

Neville was angry with him until Harry brought him into the boy's room and showed him the brand new Troll-hide boots that he was proud owner of. Most folks preferred dragon hide as it looked better, but truth be told troll hide was nearly as resistant to offensive magics and made, in Harry's opinion, a much more handsome and manly pair of shoes.

The night before, when Slippy had interrupted the shouting and tears and brought him more sweet delicious calories, Harry had managed to talk her into making the boots for him and Neville. When he saw them, he stopped being angry and gave Harry a bracing and manly fist bump. The girls had followed them into the boy's dorm and been less than impressed by Neville's response. Their ire only increase when Harry showed them the set of (in his opinion) fine troll hide purse he talked Slippy into making for them.

Harry slipped quietly from the dorm and the common room, making his way to the kitchens. He was teaching dot, the surprising young head of breakfast operations, how to make his special waffle mix. It turned out the elves had never really considered using purees in their mixes, so his apple waffles were a huge hit when he had introduced them to his elven friend the first time.

The fact that being in the kitchen and sharing his recipe meant he wouldn't be at the Hufflepuff table for the fireworks the rumor mill would produce was entirely incidental.

Having wasted the whole morning and made his waffles in huge batches for the school, Harry helped clean up fully, and then began showing the elves the finer points of his method. He was halfway through showing how using an overpowered mincing spell could produce the apple puree faster than even the elven enchanted knife method when Drip and Drop, the brothers dedicated to answering the direct calls of the staff, and head boy and girl popped in..

"Harry! Old-beardy is callings for you!"

"He has a few peoples from the ministry!"

"Theys waiting for you in his office!"

"Please comes with us, Harry!"

The brothers, who Harry had a bit of experience with, loved alternating their speech. They claimed to have given the Weasley twins the idea. Harry, having met both pairs, felt like it honestly could have gone either way. He took off an apron and dusted flour off of his shirt and jeans. It was a Sunday, and he had been strongly hoping that he could hide from the results of his evening until he could use classes as an excuse to not attend meetings. If the ministry was there though, it meant mum, which meant this was probably going to be a very long day.

With a whispered request to Drip, Harry took Drop's hand and was popped away to just down the corridor from the gargoyle that hid the headmasters office. Harry walked the rest of the way, and just before he reached the stone guardian Drip popped in next to him and handed off a small shrunken package. If Harry had to attend a meeting with the headmaster for the second time in as many days, he could at least get a laugh out of it. His birth dad would have expected nothing less from him.

The gargoyle had evidently been expecting him, as it stepped aside as soon a he presented himself before it. Harry moved up the escalating spiral stairs and went to the door. He had enough experience at the door now to know that Dumbles had some way of knowing who was there before they knocked. It felt like a waste of magic to use it on something as lame as that, so Harry had resolved to go out of his way to be annoying and beat the old man to the punch. He crossed the small landing and knocked on the door as quickly as he could.

"Harry Bones here to see you sir!"

Harry didn't bother to wait for a response and just entered, looking immediately to the old man's face. He wasn't disappointed, as he caught a hint of an annoyed frown cross the man's face before he resumed his normal grandfather-y twinkle.

Harry scanned the rest of the room. Yep, his mum was here, along with Mr. Scrimgeour, Professor McGonagall, and professor Flitwick, Harry reflected that thankfully Snape was absent.

"Ahh, young Harry. I believe we can start. Minerva here has reported last night's event to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as part of her remit as Deputy Headmistress. Your mother and Mr. Scrimgeour have come in their official capacities to learn of last night's events."

Harry looked around the room silently, trying to connect the dots. Dumbledore wasn't happy with the answers he got from Harry, so he literally ran to mum to try and get a different answer. Lord and Ladies above, the old man was seven years old if he was a day.

"Sir, Professors, Mr. Scrimgeour, Mum, I have had this conversation with the Chief Warlock already last night I gave more information than, technically speaking, I was legally required to. It annoys me to do this, but I must invoke the privilege afforded to the head of a Most Ancient and Noble house. What occurred between myself and the mountain troll, who I have been reliably informed was named 'Urg-rock!' was family business, and as no one else was injured or harmed, I am not required by any boy to divulge any information about what happened. Thank you all for your time here."

Dumbledore looked blankly at the child across desk from him, "You expect us to believe you were engaged in some form of house business with a troll that you decapitated. Within two minutes of meeting it no less? "

Harry smiled, "He was a very poor negotiator."

As the official statement portion of the meeting drew to a close, Harry slipped back into the persona of a guilty eleven year old and turned to the head of the DMLE, "With all that said and done, wanna join me for lunch since you're here mum? I have it on good authority we can get a shepherd's pie for lunch, and I know how you love that."

Harry put on his best puppy dog eyes which was actually pretty damn impressive for a budding young metamorph, prompting his mum to scowl and sigh. Scrimgeour to actually laugh out loud. Dumbledore looked like an annoyed grandfather, a look which everyone could agree didn't work well on him, and McGonagall and Flitwick both looked like they suspected this meeting was going to be a waste and they had given up their lunches for nothing.

Amelia promised her old friend that if there was anything important she'd share with him, and took her son out of the headmaster's office. Given the time, Harry figured they'd arrive just a hair too late for proper lunch, so he directed their steps towards the kitchens. Amelia was following him idly, and directed conversation to classes so far and how the family was doing. Harry was happy to fill in the details of how he met his god-brother and his only mildly annoying friend Hermione.

Amelia finally looked up and questioned what was going on when they got to the portrait of a bowl of fruit.

"Harry, why are we headed into the kitchens?"

"Oh, well I was halfway through showing the guys my waffle recipe, and I know they keep a bit of the food over after in case one of the kids knows where they are and missed lunch. They'll take care of us."

Amelia was taken aback by Harry's words. She knew where the kitchens were and knew it was staffed by elves. Being Sirius' girlfriend in seventh year guaranteed that kind of knowledge, she just didn't understand her son's words. The guys? Harry had always been close to the elves in the Ossuary, but she had thought that was just Harry being Harry.

"Harry, if we're going to be talking about things you don't want Dumbledore to know, why are we hanging out with the elves? You know they report to him, don't you?"

"Of course I do, mum. But elf business is kept among elves. Even if they weren't my people, they like me better than they do him. They'd take care of us," they had fully entered the kitchen now, and Harry called out into the kitchen, "Hey Pointy! Could you bring me and my mum one of the pies from lunch? We're gonna be talking about the whole troll thing. If you see Slippy and she isn't busy, could you point her my way too?"

The elf in question gave a small wave as he floated a meter tall stack of plates towards the massive cabinets that held the school's crockery.

Harry led his mum to the small table near the ever present fire in the heart of the kitchen. All around the mother-son pair a hundred elves went quietly about their business. The reflection of the fire glinted off the massive pots (each more industrial reaction vessel than cookware) that the elves used to make the bases for the meals. Hundreds of plates flew through the air, levitated by scores of elves through washing area and into piles for storage until the next meal. Amelia had been on edge for weeks, but even her nerves couldn't help but be calmed by the colors, smells, clinks, and clanks that all screamed normalcy and safety. The kitchens of Hogwarts held an ancient magic in themolder than Hogwarts and older than organized history. The magic of home, of a family gathering about a fire and breaking their fast, and harry wasn't hiding behind the overwhelming calm and safety of that feeling, no sir.

When she finally took a seat at the table, Amelia closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply of the air and magic of the place, more than even the feeling of the place, she was happy to be back here. She had dozens of memories of this table in this room, some more work appropriate than others, but all the same, it was like someone made comfort into a physical place. A tension she wasn't aware of carrying leached from her shoulders. As a pop sounded nearby and an elf deposited a pair of food laden plates in front of her and her son, she turned a gimlet eye on the boy across the table from her.

"So. Harry. We're going to start with what you were doing when you apparently hunted down and killed a troll, then you're going to explain to me why you know all of the elves in this supposedly off-limits place by name, and then maybe we'll move on to why they like you more than they like Dumbledore."

Harry quickly took a bite to get himself an extra second before he had to answer, and when he had thoroughly chewed his bite he swallowed and started, "Well, I think I know why the Uric guy who commissioned my wand was a master dueler. I looked into it a bit, and it looks like wand cores are usually a substance from a single magical being, more than one magical creature being use for a single core has a history of making a wand almost alive. My wand speaks to me, a lot like Hedwig does," Harry looked down at his food for a second, something very like confusion on his face, "Oddly enough, Hedwig agrees with it more often than not, but that's not the point. Everything I hear from it has been realy helpful so far, and I've been thinking that if Hedwig is okay with it then it can't be bad. But the more I listened to it, the more antsy I would get. Then Halloween. You know why I would hate Samhain. I may have only found out recently, but I lost a lot on that night," Amelia grimaced, she hadn't thought about that, Harry would be a little crazy the night he lost his parents, "and when Professor Quirrell came into the great hall last night yelling about the troll before he fainted, I just kinda snapped. The teachers told all of us to go to our common rooms, but the Slytherin and Hufflepuff common rooms are in the dungeons, and that's where Quirrell said the troll was. I heard all of that, and I figured out what the antsy feeling was," Harry stopped looking at his mum and began staring off into the distance, "The wand was giving me these feelings of blood-lust. It wanted me to go into combat, it wanted me to test myself against the troll, to protect my people, my tribe. So I did. And I could feel the fire in my blood, I felt the clash, the release from casting a spell, chain, I ran, I jumped, I tracked, I followed, and I fought. It was everything I needed, it was everything the wand promised it would be, I was worried about giving in to it, I knew I could hold off the feelings, but Hedwig agreed so I went for it, and it was glorious. "

Harry trailed off, still staring into the distance. Amelia was enraptured by his words. The lust for battle was something she had known when she had apprenticed to Mad-eye, and when she had led her team with Sirius and James against the death eaters when they started. She could remember feeling that way. Her mind before and after made sure that she had done right, that she had only fought the right people and for the right reasons, but in the moment it was the glory of war. The release of the endorphins Harry and Nym were always going on about. Hitting that sweet spot just at the base of a death-eater's _protego_ , watching them trip and spill onto the ground, seeing red flush over the blade Sirius had always insisted she carry.

It was what Mad-eye, as he quietly confessed one night, kept living for, why he couldn't just retire. That feeling. All of the finest aurors felt it. She knew it, she had been one and she had hand selected every one of the ones to follow her. It was what kept a dark wizard catcher alive after twenty years of fighting the darkness, and it was what made dark wizards such a gods damned problem.

And her eleven year old son just described the feeling with the same clarity she could have. Fuck.

Harry met her gaze again, "I know how crazy it sounds. I was there, I mean I know how crazy it felt. I don't regret it though. Not for an instant. The club on that troll was probably fifteen stone alone. If that thing had been in the dungeons, if the 'Puffs had walked into it? I was careful, I was safe, and I had a phoenix telling me it was okay, and Hedwig even helped me take it down."

Harry put on a very mischievous smile, "I also have a kind of gift for you, I was really hoping you might put it up in your office? You know, kinda like mums in the non-magical world would put like pottery or something from their kids in their offices?"

Harry removed the package Drip had handed off to him from his pocket, placing it on the table next to them and casting a quick _engorgio_. The pocket sized trophy quickly assumed it regular proportions, and beside the pair soon laid a nicely mounted troll's head.

"Pleeeeeeease put it up in your office? Like right behind you on the wall? So it could be like staring down anyone that came in?"

Harry threw off his best puppy dog eyes, and Amelia burst out into laughter. Trust Harry to do something like this. Letting him have access to James' old journals had been a terrible idea.


	11. Yule, a Dragon, a Unicorn

Chapter Ten: Yule, a Dragon, a Unicorn

* * *

It took two weeks, pairs of troll hide boots for all of the girls in his life, several dozen galleons worth of owl orders from Honeydukes, re-mounting and changing of the facial expression on the troll trophy (trollphy? Harry amused himself easily), and finally a number of bracing fist bumps and whispers of 'Women!' with Neville, but finally everything evened out.

Nym stopped hitting him on principle, Susan and Hannah stopped looking teary eyed whenever he entered the room, and Hermione ceased quoting his rules violations at him between classes. Harry could accept Nym, Susan, and Hannah, but the rule violations were getting to him.

Probably the only real change was that Snape had taken to sparing their class fifteen minutes of attention, mostly spent breathing down Harry's neck and critiquing his abilities. The friends reflected that he probably felt he was bearing down on a trouble student and showing him the weight his displeasure might bring onto rule breakers. Unfortunately for the long nosed man his comments, while petty, actually gave direction to their readings on the potions process. His attempts at being a jerk to Harry were actually helping the group's brewing process. All told, Harry had almost a decade's worth of experience shaking off actual abuse. A weird guy with a bathing problem and penchant for the dramatic (have you seen how he makes his cape swirl?) was more like actual child's play than any of the playing Harry had ever done as a child.

* * *

Before Christmas and its accompanying break was the opening of the quidditch season, and of the group only Harry and Hermione found that they didn't care.

Nym, Susan, Hannah, and Neville were all raised magical. Even Neville, who had spent the vast majority of his life hidden at his family manor, was a diehard fan of the sport.

The first game of the season, and the only game before break, was between Slytherin and Gryffindor. For the average game usually the crowd consisted of students from the interested houses, but there was so much enmity between the houses that the whole school showed up for the show put on by the snakes and lions.

This year they were not disappointed.

The snakes appeared to have no real talent for the game, instead they seemed to use physical assault as a game strategy. Thankfully for the audience, the Gryffindor seeker shared a skill level with his counterpart, meaning the kids got to watch a solid four hours of what Harry could only call a glorified blood sport.

By the end of the game each seeker had been unseated twice, the beaters had each managed a pair of black eyes, and the captain of the Gryffindor team had broken an arm. Even if magical people were twice as hard to damage as their mundane counterparts, studded bats and flying cannon balls tend to do the trick.

The game managed to lower Harry's already less than sterling opinion of the wizarding public.

The friends all did extremely well on their end of term exams. While admittedly Hermione did fairly well on her own merit, the rest of the group threw Harry a small party in thanks for his sharing the several hundred years of collected wisdom he had. Harry wondered if they honestly thought he would do anything else.

All in all, it was a quiet and simple run up to the Yule break.

* * *

The kids made their way safely onto the gleaming Hogwarts express. As they moved through the small country station, they passed under the twinkling eyes of their headmaster. The nervous whispers of the upper years told the friends that this was something of a change. Evidently Flitwick usually oversaw the egress of the student masses to their home-places.

A pair of gossiping 'Claws the friends followed suspected that it was because he was a dueling champion, and therefore best able to deal with any problems that may crop up. They went on to speculate why the theoretically more powerful Dumbledore had chosen to show up now but not in previous years. Harry tuned them out, his own suspicions coursing through his mind.

Dumbledore had been following the friends around a lot during the year. He had even sat through the back of a number of their classes. Harry knew perfectly well how much the man had seen fit to mess with his life, and he suspected that the old man knew at least one of the family names he had been hiding. Sadly it was likely the important one.

Harry knew he was protected by those same names to a great extent, and thankfully that protection was unlikely to go away. The old families all guarded their privileges jealously, and were each unlikely to vote to have any of the protections stripped from any family of similar prestige. It would set a dangerous precedent after all.

The worst the old man could do is try something for the Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, or Peverell titles, in which case he would be forced to reveal himself and put someone in charge of those seats in the Wizengamot. The Potter seat would be more problematic. Wizengamot records that his mum had dug up for him showed that the meddler had tried to get _Snape_ of all people put in as the proxy for the seat. Thankfully in Harry's absence the public had demanded the seat be held pristine in trust for him. The Wizengamot had carried that idea through; though it was likely they had done it so a new seat wouldn't throw off any of their precious alliances or voting blocs.

The train ride was uneventful for the friends, but it wasn't without its entertainment. Malfoy and Weasley were at each other's throats the whole ride, and there were no less than four different confrontations during the ride, each of which ended up being a square draw. The Weasley twins diffused one, and patrolling prefects caught the rest, but the bumbling power plays the two shared were hilarious. Harry was more glad than ever to be a Hufflepuff, no powerplaying, no fighting, just friends and getting work done.

Before they could get too bored, the train arrived at King's Cross and they met their folks. Harry felt Amelia and Andi looked resplendent in their troll hide boots and with their troll hide bags they seemed to be showing off to Madam Longbottom, the Abbots, and the Granger family. Harry decided to take the high road and stuck his tongue out at all of his female friends, not in the least because it seemed like Hermione and Hannah's mothers were expressing interested in getting a troll hide bag of their own.

The group exchanged pleasantries, and after a few people dropped hints about what kind of troll based gifts they would like to see under their trees, the group split and went home. This would be Harry's third ever Christmas, he was still getting used to giving and receiving gifts. The raven haired boy was thankful he wouldn't have to look too far.

Harry spent his break relaxing with his family. Hannah was over almost every day, like she usually was, and the kids had a grand time flying around the grounds of the Bones and Abbot manors again.

Harry spent a lot of time trying to convince his mum to teach him to aparate. Being the head of the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Peverell families tied him into the ward schemes for all of their respective properties. Almost all of the founder's lands (the exceptions being lands long held under public trust) were hidden under heavy wards, and all of the Peverell properties were. The only way onto the lands would be for Harry to personally lead an apparition there, as none of the adults could make portkeys or aparate to places they had never been that were also warded, and a two week trip to get there normally just wasn't in the cards.

Harry had dozens of houses, with untold amounts of rare books, gold, strange artifacts, and dust lying all around them, and he couldn't touch a single one of them until he was able to personally aparate! It had been driving him slowly up the wall since he had identified the feelings he was getting from the wards. Amelia, despite what she knew could only be a wealth of knowledge (and just plain wealth), was unsympathetic.

The apparition debate was one they had been having since Harry was introduced to the wizarding world and the idea of teleportation. It was an argument so old and rehashed that Susan, Hannah, and Nym all prepared a scoreboard after the first year to mark down how many times each had won it. The score, it hardly bears saying, was heavily in Amelia's favor. Apparition was something that wasn't taught to kids because it was dangerous. The act itself was a witch or wizard essentially mentally ripping a small hole in the world and throwing themselves through another dimension to the place they had intended to reach. Until the rough age of fifteen, the magical cores of kids were unstable, and there were centuries worth of examples of what happens when an unstable magician tries to defy physics like that. The results were, more often than not, spread across several countries in ways that were both impossible to repair, and difficult to explain to non-magicals.

The kids showed the adults the journals and notes they had recovered from Ravenclaw's hidden study room, as well as telling them about the room itself, which after some small study had impressed the hell out of them.

Amelia and Andi both were slowly becoming numb to the things that their kids got up to. If it wasn't enough that Amelia had unknowingly adopted Harry Potter, it was the same killing a troll, or defying the laws of magic and common sense. Spend enough time in Harry's presence and you could become used to anything.

A trip to Gringotts saw Amelia and Harry both turn everything they had over to a team of Goblin lawyers. Both were incredibly frustrated, Amelia because her best efforts couldn't make heads or tails of the nth dimensional maze that was wizarding law, Harry because not even being the head of a Most Ancient and Noble House could get him his godfather back, or even the Order of Merlin removed from Pettigrew. General public knowledge had Sirius being ejected from the Black family by his mother, so they couldn't even play the ancient family name card that way.

Master Rel, having apparently gotten several promotions for the amount of business his accounts (read: Harry Potter alone) were generating, promised them the very best the Goblin nation could do.

Harry refreshed the family journal selection he had on hand, and they left the halls of the Goblin king.

* * *

Shortly before the kids were due back at Hogwarts, Amelia cornered Harry for another talk like they had shared in the castle's kitchens. She was worried about her son. Harry was normal enough, well… Okay. Even in her head that felt like a lie. He was wizard normal at best, and completely bat-shit insane at worst, but as a mother she couldn't allow herself to think that about her son.

She was worried about how much he identified with house elves, and she was also pretty concerned about whether or not there would be a repeat of the troll incident. Harry, in an unprecedented event, managed to assuage her fears.

House elves were born and raised to serve. It's what they did. They lived their own lives; they loved, lived, raised kids, and occasionally fell in battle against evil forces, but they primarily served. Harry told her about that, and told her about how he felt the same. No matter what mind healers said when he talked to them, Harry was who he was. His first memories were of serving, and he had been cleaning, cooking, and taking care of things for the _vast_ majority of his life. It wasn't a negative thing, it wasn't even a positive thing, it just was. He didn't make a big deal out of it, but most of the family's favorite foods were old recipes of his that he had taught the house elves, and on occasions, made for them. Harry's was the only room in the house that the elves wouldn't clean, and when he couldn't sleep sometimes, Harry actively assisted in cleaning the rest of the manor.

It took her a while to wrap her mind around, but she came to realized that her son just helped out. It was a thing he did.

Their discussions of his wand and the worrisome feelings it evoked were no less fruitful. Harry had spent some time thinking about it. Left to his own devices, even without the balance of a phoenix in the back of his head, he could resist the call to action. His need to go out and do something had practically disappeared in the wake of the troll incident, but having fully experienced it, Harry could feel the buzzing slowly edging into his awareness again. He could feel the call to arms slowly building in his blood. The pair agreed, if it got too much, Harry would let her know. The aurors had a few firing ranges and things where Harry could let off steam if it got too much, and overall they both felt concerned but better.

* * *

With another trip to King's Cross, and another quarter day train ride filled with terrifying armed hormonal teenagers, the kids came back to Hogwarts to begin the second part of their first year.

Harry and company resumed their standard operating procedure. Classes went by easily, the results from term testing showing the friends as ranking in the top of their year. They dug deeper into journals from Ravenclaw's hidden room, and Harry dug deeper into his family's own history.

It turned out that being insane was less of a Harry thing and more of a Potter thing. All of the pranking things his dad had gotten up to with the 'Marauders' were his expression of the family business. It turned out that no fewer than seven different Potters had been winners of the Triwizard championship. Seven of the eight most successful expeditions to find Atlantis had been captained by Potters or Potter ancestors. One Potter, to Harry's extreme amusement, had been a feared pirate in the Caribbean before declaring that stealing from the merchant marine was boring, whereupon he left that entire part of the world to go the steppes of the Mongolian highlands in search of the tomb of Genghis Khan's chief wizard.

Over the years the name Potter had been synonymous with the ridiculous. Potters had broken more laws of magic (if a few of the diaries depicting massive harems and orgies were to be believed, decency as well. It made Harry blush, and he had total control over all of his bodily processes) than any other single family. It was how they had made their family fortune.

Harry, given the life he had led up to that point, had never felt closer to his family. It was kinda nice to know that traditionally, his folks were just as crazy as apparently he was.

* * *

School continued apace, right up until Harry went down to share an afternoon with Hagrid, only to find the half-giant's hut shut up tight and roughly fifty degrees inside. He had a massive fire running in his wood stove, and a large soup pot closed sitting in the middle of the blaze.

"Hey Hagrid, were you feeling a mite cold, maybe?"

Nym had come down to see Hagrid with him as she shared Harry's interest in the big guy. The two quickly divested themselves of their cloaks, outer robes, and if dignity did not forbid it, Nym was considering her shirt as well. Hagrid himself was wearing the single largest short sleeve shirt either of the kids had ever seen, and was near constantly wiping his brow with a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth.

"Nah yer lordship," Harry cringed slightly at the title, Hagrid liked bothering him with it, "I managed to find meself a genuine dragon's egg! I been look 'bout the library and found a few nice books, managed to identify the breed from the egg 'n everythin'."

Hagrid was easily the most animated Harry had ever seen him. If bouncing where he stood wouldn't result in hitting his roof, Harry thought the large guy would have been a blur of movement. He and Nym shared a look. They were currently in a wooden hut at the edge of a large and decidedly wooden forest. This wasn't gonna end well.

"I got me a Norwegian Ridge-back! Says in ole' Scamander's book they grow to a solid fifteen meters from tip to tip, an' they end up weighing sumthin' like twenty tonnes. Got a twenty meter wingspan too!"

"Hagrid, I don't want to be a buzzkill, but you're gonna be raising a fire breathing dragon in a hut made of wood. Isn't that one of those terrible ideas my friends are always warning me about?"

"Not even a bit! Since ye got me a wand, I've bin practicing. I got really strong flame freezing charms all around me place, I had Flitwick out here a bit earlier and he said he figured they was strong enough to resist a dragon. I even went to see Professor Bablin' and she went and gave me the right runes to protect sumthin' from fire. I been carving'em around me place and in all the trees 'round here. See, thought I'd do it all proper," He finished, grin splitting his face nearly in two.

"Okay, so you've protected your place and the forest around here. Have you talked to the folks in the forest though? Having a dragon around would affect more than just us. You were telling me that the centaurs don't like wizards mucking about in the forest, it's probably a bad idea to bring a dragon in without talking to them."

The big guy's face fell, "I didn't think of that. Firenze might hear me out, but Bane has been pretty angry lately."

Harry had a hard time denying any of his friends anything if it was in his power. He knew that a dragon probably wasn't a bright idea, but it was something Hagrid had been telling him about since he first met him.

"I'll tell you what, if I push for it, I can probably wrangle you a breeding license because you're sworn to my house. House Potter getting a dragon breeding license isn't that out of character anyway. If you can get the centaurs to agree to it on behalf of the creature of the forest, and if you can get them to agree to help raise it since I think a dragon might be a bit much for you to do on your own, I'll get you the license."

Hagrid swept the small boy up into a huge sweaty hug, "Yer a good man, Harry Potter! Yer a good man, thank you!"

Harry managed to pat the emotional man on the shoulder as he fought for consciousness inside arms with the literal strength of a giant.

Harry sent a missive off to Master Rel the next day, asking after the requirements for House Potter to acquire a dragon breeding permit. Across the country in a richly appointed office, deep in the marble depths of Gringotts, a Goblin looked at a letter from his client and couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and sigh. Something deep inside him was saying that this was a bad idea, but duty was duty. If Harry Potter decided that raising dragons was a thing wanted to do, Rel had no recourse but to help.

* * *

A few weeks passed, and Drip passed Harry a note in Hagrid's distinctive scrawl asking to meet him as soon as he could after dinner. With Nym in tow, Harry made his way down to Hagrid's place to find him in his full dragonhide armor with a gigantic crossbow over his shoulder in front of his hut.

"Harry! How ya been? I've been talking to the centaurs, and they agree that a dragon could be a powerful protector of the forest if'n it were raised right. They agreed to help me and to help the dragon on one condition, we gotta find and stop whatever's been going through the forest and killin' the unicorns."

Nym gasped next to harry, turning to him quickly, "Harry we have to help. There isn't anything more pure or more innocent than a unicorn, we've gotta help!"

Harry folded Nym into a hug, she looked like she needed one, and he turned to his big friend, "Of course we'll help, we'd help anyway if we could. You look ready to go to war there, what do you need from us?"

"Well, I left the egg with the centaurs, they been talking to it and tryin' ta teach it while it's still in tha shell. I know you kids are powerful good a' magic. Do ya think ye can manage a disillusion spell?"

In answer Harry pulled out his wand and looked intently at his enormous friend, before glancing at Nym.

She met his eyes, and gave a minute shake of her head. He grimaced and looked back to Hagrid.

"I don't think so, we're pretty good, but disillusionment takes a really precise amount of magic. We just aren't there yet. We'd likely mess something up and end up just melting or exploding you by accident. We can color charm all of you to make you better fit into the shadows, and a few silencing charms would probably do wonders for you if you're stalking in the forest."

Nym drew her wand resolutely and with a bump of her shoulder caught Harry's gaze again. Her eyes flicked between his and the not so distant forest meaningfully. Harry raised an eyebrow and when she looked firmly at him again he spoke up to his liegeman.

"If you want, we could come with you too. We've been working with professor McGonagall and we have gotten really good with changing our noses into something like a dog's nose, and changing our eyes into something that works a lot better in the dark. We could probably be useful. Combat spells are easy, thankfully, it doesn't matter if we accidentally overpower them."

Hagrid looked conflicted. If they were older he'd be asking, they wouldn't have to offer. But this was his lord, an eleven year old, and the son of the head of the DMLE. If something bad happened to the pair in front of him, he'd never forgive himself and Amelia probably wouldn't look kindly on him either. Harry thankfully took the decision out of his hands.

"You know that I take this stuff seriously. I can't in good faith let you go out there alone. I can handle myself," Hagrid glanced at his nice new pair of boots and nodded idly, "and Nym can too. We'll head out at the first sign of something we can't handle, but let us help. This is a unicorn we're talking about. It's worth the effort."

Hagrid gave a tight nod, and they started. The pair cast their spells darkening Hagrid's appearance and their own, and they tweaked their forms, making themselves taller and slimmer. They needed longer legs to stay even with Hagrid as they went through the bush and by making themselves unnaturally slim they made themselves easier to hide. Minor bone density increases and significant muscle density increases left them with a normal strength despite their new more odd shapes. They applied silencing charms, and Harry cast a modified bubble-head he had read about in Rowena's journals designed to suppress odors.

Nym and Harry both took deep breaths of the air, trying to find anything that smelled like blood. Neither had a lot of experience with unicorns in specific, but smell is a very primal sense. Anything that struck the lizard brain in the back of their heads as off was likely the correct trail.

The three set off into the forest, Harry and Nym sticking right next to Hagrid. By unspoken agreement, they knew they were good and could take care of themselves, but they were still first years. The company of a half-giant seemed prudent if nothing else.

After about a kilometer, they each caught something that stuck out heavily from between the pine and moss of the forest. Harry took point to guide them in and Nym stayed a step behind Hagrid as they moved deeper into the forest, heading rapidly towards a small pool of a silver incandescent liquid.

They reached it and Hagrid took a knee. He touched his fingers to the pool and rubbed them together, feeling the consistency of the liquid and taking a deep whiff off it. Harry just scrunched his noes form where he stood, Nym gave an almost unconscious nod of agreement. They could smell it fine from where they stood, it was pungent. And wrong.

Quietly Hagrid spoke, "Yeah, this is unicorn blood, no doubt. The centaurs tol' me that sommat in the forest been hunting them. they say they found a few bodies so far this year, each drained a' it blood."

He fell quiet for a moment, staring off into the distance, "Powerful stuff, blood of a unicorn. Ya could drink it and it would keep ya from dying, even if ye were on the brink of death. If it weren't freely given, you'd be cursed. Powerfully cursed. Every day you lived would be filled with agony an' fear. We best find what's been doing this right quick, anythin' desperate enough ta do this could do anythin'."

Harry nodded in comprehension and Nym tensed noticeably. At his glance she blinked and put on a brave face, nodding her readiness to continue. Harry gave his own in answer, and took point again when Hagrid stood and they started moving forward.

The pool of blood they found turned them onto the trail of the unicorn, leading them deeper into the forest. The magical beast left hardly any trail, even in its injured state it moved through bushes and across loose soil like the wind, leaving no sign of its passing.

Harry tracked the blood trail as best he could, which was the only evidence of the unicorn's movements. Drips, and pools where it stood and rested for a time, were the only concrete lead they had, and as they followed the brush became thicker. Soon the canopy overhead blocked even the light of the stars, and the three were left moving as quickly and quietly as they could through pitch black terrain.

They passed fallen trees by the dozen and moved over a stream, the farther they went the more they felt the gaze of the forest on them, the hairs on the back of each of their necks rising in response to movement they could only see from the corners of their eyes. More than once they would see eyes reflecting dimly at them from the black, stationary in the distance as if passing judgement. As soon as one looked away they disappeared.

At once the wind stopped rustling the leaves and branches overhead, leaving them in an unnatural silence as they continued following the trail of blood. It disappeared from view frequently, and the three could only move forward based on the now faint smell of blood and the pervasive feeling of wrongness that accompanied it.

Darkness, watchers, and the silence of the forest reached a climax, an ultimate crescendo where even the smell of the blood disappeared and the only thing that seemed to exist were the others they walked with. Harry felt Nym move closer, he could almost feel her extend a hand to hold his, the heat from her body fighting the chill of the forest enough for him to sense her close with him. She hesitated and before Harry moved to meet her halfway they saw it.

It appeared like lightning. A clearing opened up in front of them, moonlight drifted down from an opening in the trees above, and crouched at the glowing whit flank of a majestic horse was a cloaked figure. Wreathed in darkness and shadow, a worn black cloak dragging on the ground behind it, they could hear it feed as it hunched over it's terrible prize.

Each of the three's eyes seemed to slide off the thing, as if their minds were having a hard time seeing what was before them, or perhaps the horror of what was in front of them was just too much for them to grasp.

As the figure drank from the unicorn's lifeblood, Harry tapped Hagrid and Nym. In a whisper, "I go left, Nym go right, at the count of fifteen, Hagrid fire and we each _reducto_ it. Careful to miss the unicorn. Good?"

Two nods, and the count began.

By five Harry was in position, directly behind the figure.

At seven he could see Nym creeping into position, her movements unnaturally smooth as if she grew a few extra joints for the movement.

At ten, Harry could barely make out Hagrid fully unlimber the crossbow and take aim.

After five more seconds, there was a deep twang, followed by twin cries of _reducto!_

The crossbow bolt hit the figure in the shoulder, the force of the missile knocking it off balance and to the side. Harry and by some miracle Nym as well both counted on the figure to be knocked to the side, and soon twin blasting curses impacted the cloaked figure from the front and back, each punching a visible hole in the thing's cloak and aura.

There was a beat of silence following the flurry of attack, and then the creature released an inhuman cry, flying upward into the night. Harry fired off a trio of _reducto_ s along the likely flight oath of the creature, hearing one positive impact, before the three converged on the fallen unicorn.

It's eyes rolled wildly about wildly, foam appearing at the edges of its mouth. Nym went to the head, approaching carefully to avoid the horn, and she began stroking and whispering calm words to it. Hagrid and Harry went immediately to the injury.

"This doesn't look good. We need to clean this and close it. If it loses much more blood I don't think it will survive."

Hedwig flashed into the clearing, alighting on Harry's shoulder. As soon as her talons found purchase on his shoulder, Harry visibly relaxed.

"Oh thank the gods, girl. How the hell could I have forgotten about you, I'm sorry, it was just really tense. Can you help us?"

Hedwig could tell that berating her wizard needed to wait; she gingerly took to the injured unicorn's side and began crooning. The unicorn had been calming slowly with Nym's tender ministrations, but as Hedwig began to sing it lost all the tension it had been holding on to. Thick, viscous, and pearly tears dropped from her eye to the wound in the unicorn's hide, it drew in a quick pained breath as its wound closed in a moment, the flesh knitting closed, leaving behind an ugly scar and a living unicorn.

Tentatively it took to its feet. The unicorn took a few steps, favoring its side, before walking about the clearing normally. It walked up to each of the three speechless people, gently nibbling their offered fingers and rubbing against them. With a quiet wicker, it moved off through the clearing and out into the forest.

No one had words for what happened, so they remained silent. At his familiar's urging, Harry linked hands with the others, and they were flamed to right in front of Hagrid's cabin. The half-giant took his leave at his door and the remaining pair were fire flashed to the hufflepuff common room.

By that point, it was late and no one else was about. Without letting go of each other's hand, Harry and Nym shifted back to their base forms. Harry gave her hand a gentle and reassuring squeeze, and the pair separated into their separate dorms.

It had been kind of a long night.


	12. The Inevitable, Really

Chapter Eleven: The Inevitable, Really

* * *

None of the three talked about their evening out. Hagrid mostly because he didn't have a lot of people to talk to and because it was business with his lord, Harry and Nym because they knew the results of sharing that particular story. Neither particularly wanted to bear Hermione's recriminations, Susan and Hannah's fear, or the stern words of their respective parents.

The quidditch season progressed, with their seeker (some guy named Diggory) leading them to victory over Ravenclaw and not much else. They had spent most of the year on it, but the friends pieced together the whole story of what was going on in Rowena's secret room. It turned out that none of the experiments she had running were particularly volatile, and all were well above the ability of a group of first years to figure out and finish.

They ensured that the notes on the experiments were marked and properly placed in her research journals, then put everything away finally.

Susan, Hannah, and Neville all seemed to be getting closer to one another. Harry suspected the girls liked him, and if his bright red face when they teased him was any indication, the feelings were likely mutual. It was a lot of fun to talk to Neville in the boy's dorm about what he thought of the girls, making him turn red and dissemble about his feelings. Neville hadn't had the same kind of upbringing that Harry did, but being stuck as the only child living in a manor house practically alone for a decade brought its own challenges. Harry may have known him for less than a year, but if he could help it in the slightest he would be there for his brother, if only to tease him about girls.

Neville's relatives had thought he was a squib (a term that had Harry wrinkling his nose, it was like being magical directly converted people into prejudiced idiots) and they had gone through years of forcing him into weird and life threatening situations to force his magic out. It wasn't abuse like Harry had suffered, but it walked the line pretty finely. The result had left a really nice kid without a hair of confidence in himself.

Meeting his god-brother and joining the family had worked wonders for him. His gran even let him come over to the Ossuary during winter break at one point, and they had all had an amazing time. Harry fell into a bit of a loophole as a head of house, he could actually use magic outside of school. They had taken advantage of it when Neville came over to construct massive snow forts for them to play around in.

Neville also delighted in playing the straight man to Harry's personal brand of insane comedy. It was a solid bonding exercise for the pair. More than once he had commented something like, 'Nice weather today, isn't it?' when Harry conjured storm clouds to follow the girls around and rain on them for an hour. He also delighted in messing with people by having Harry morph into his features, and walk around as if they were twins.

Malfoy had once accused Neville of being a squib loudly in class, only to spend the next three hours being chased about the school and hexed by Neville. When he went to Snape to complain, it was discovered that Neville had been with Professor Sprout in the greenhouses the whole time, asking extra questions about the fire-breathing dragon snaps they had re-potted that day.

All in all, they had a grand time.

The week before their final exams, Harry got confirmation via owl that House Potter was now indeed licensed for the breeding of dragons on British shores. The note included a post script with references to a number of good resources regarding breeding and raising a dragon, as well as a personal plea from Master Rel that Harry ensure that no one grew to regret the transaction. Harry couldn't help but smile, with _just_ a trace of mania in his eyes when he read it.

Hagrid was now, technically, licensed to breed and raise any dragon he wanted, though Harry intended to implore the man to not adopt another at the very least until Norbert (as he had named his scaled spawn) was fully grown and taken care of. The license was technical because Hagrid was oath-sworn to House Gryffindor, not House Potter. Unfortunately, Gryffindor was known as a long dead house, so if it popped up again out of nowhere asking for rights to dragon breeding it would get them, but it would also raise a number of questions Harry had no desire to answer. House Potter getting a license was much easier to hide, and also very much in character for the house. Since Lord Gryffindor and Heir-Apparent Potter were the same person, if someone so much as looked at Hagrid or Norbert sideways all he had to do was properly identify himself.

On reflection, it was stupid risk. This drastically increased the odds that he would end up having to reveal who he was. Harry had been thinking though. He _would_ be outed sooner or later. The ability to actually hide who he was for the seven years he'd be in the sights of the Chief Warlock was certainly beyond him. In the beginning he had been committed to hiding, but now he was no longer so adamant. It would come out when it came out. No sooner and no later.

As Harry was walking with Nym out to give Hagrid the good news, something changed. In the middle of a corridor that led to the entrance hall, Harry stopped dead. He didn't know what it was. Something was different. Nym took a few extra step down the hall before noticing that Harry had stopped. She turned in place and caught the searching expression on Harry's face.

"Harry, what's going on?"

He only raised a finger to tell her to be quiet, closing his eyes he tilted his head to the side as he focused. In Hogwarts different could mean dessert would be served first, or that there was a hellhound hiding in the next room. Knowing which was important. Something was telling him this was deadly-important and not fun-important. The part of his mind that was connected to his wand began sending signals, his blood pressure spiked and the buzzing he had felt in his blood before the Troll incident returned full force. This was big.

"Something's wrong, Nym, hold on."

The Hufflepuff and Gryffindor rings on his hand began heating up and vibrating slightly. With a moment's warning, Harry felt a foreign pressure wrap around his mind and squeeze.

Then Harry heard a voice, " _CHILD. YOU ARE NEEDED. WE CALL TO YOU THROUGH OUR CREATORS. EVIL IS INSIDE US. GO TO THE FORBIDDEN CORRIDOR, BREAK THROUGH THE OBSTACLES, DEFEND US AND OUR CHILDREN._ "

With its message imparted, the pressure released, thankfully before the headache that normally followed could start.

Nym looked on her friend with extreme worry on her face. Harry was an odd duck, no two ways about it, but his practical jokes revolved around making people smell funny or rain clouds composed of roses following you around all day. He didn't do things like this.

She took three steps to get to his side and put a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently from his reverie.

"Harry, H, hey, come back to me. I need you here, boy-o."

Harry's eyes opened slowly, "Shit. Nym, I think the castle just spoke to me. It said it came through the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor rings, and it felt like it did. I need to go."

He took a few uncoordinated and distracted steps back down the hall, before shaking his head. He turned by to Nym, "I have to go, the castle called to me, I need to go defend it," Nym immediately went to follow him, "No! This could be bad, Nym, I can't let you come, go get help."

Her face literally turned red as she responded, "Well suck it up, buck-o. I'm going with you. You need someone to watch your back. Besides, you know what mum, Hannah and Susan would do to me if I let you go off alone?"

Harry lost a little color at that, "Fine. But you stick right next to me, got it?" he was answered by a tight nod, " 'Kay, then we're doing this my way. Just like I told you about the troll, bone and muscle density increases, flood yourself with adrenaline and endorphins, and get ready to block off any nerves in case you get hurt. Got it?"

Another, if anything tighter, nod.

Harry answered with one of his own, and the two were off, like blurs through the hallways. Harry led the way to a little used moving staircase, the castle routed it up to the second floor and the pair rushed up it, taking the trick staircase hidden behind the tapestry of McDougal the Mild they hit the third floor left side in record time.

As they sprinted through the hall, Harry began firing off _alohomora_ s at each of the door in their way, waiting for the quiet click that signified it had an effect. The door at the end of the hall responded, so the pair nearly tore off its hinges getting in.

As they entered, their hearts pounding in their ears, they came face to face with a gently snoring Cerberus.

"Why does this feel like another one of Hagrid's friends?"

As if sensing their presence the harp that had been strumming in the corner went dead, and the snores of the great beast began petering off. Harry immediately pointed to the open trapdoor near the leftmost head of the dog, and Nym preceded him in jumping through it.

As Harry joined her he subconsciously increased the density of the tendons in his legs as he lengthened the same. He had no idea how far the fall was, but his playing around with Nym had shown the upper limit they could do without being seriously hurt was around four stories in a dead fall.

He landed next to Nym a kind of leafy and vine-y bed. Harry was happy to note that she too had made the falling changes to her legs. They shortened their legs back to normal and looked around. There was no clear exit, but the vines all seemed to be creeping towards them.

Before either really noticed it, their legs were hopelessly tangled by the plant around them, and their lower bodies were in the process of being claimed. Nym looked to Harry in a moment of desperation, "Bugger. Herbology is Neville's thing."

"I take offense to that, I'm pretty decent with it too! _Incendio!"_

A stream of fire from Harry's wand shot from its tip like a flamethrower, burning away the plants trying to get control of his hand. He swept the fire around him in a circle, forcing the creeping vines to withdraw or suffer the fate of their fellows. A moment's work saw Nym free, and together they worked to find the exit.

In the middle of the room was another hole down, but thankfully with a visible floor a meter and half below. The kids dropped through and into the next room.

The room turned out to be the dead end of a long corridor. The wall were large stone blocks mortared together. It looked like the same architecture of the dungeons, but the hallway spoke of ages of neglect. Moss grew in the cracks in the walls, and there was a steady dripping coming from somewhere down the hall.

Harry and Nym advance steadily but with caution, Andi's favorite movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, so the kids knew well what kind of things could be waiting for them in a place like this.

After three minutes walking, they came to a massive room filled with fluttering and... chirping? They shared a dubious look and entered fully, only to see hundreds and hundreds of what looked like winged keys, most perched on the many arches connecting the columns that held the roof. At the other end of the room were a pair of brooms, and a truly massive door.

The two approached the door only to find it locked. The intent of the room was obvious, catch the correct key. Nym's whispered _accio_ also showed them that whoever made this test or trap planned at least far enough ahead to make the answer not summonable.

Harry began examining the door as Nym started towards the brooms, only to be stopped by Harry.

"Wait, this is easier than that, come here, just _defodio_ around the hinge here. Screw flying, this'll be faster."

As the crowds of enchanted keys looked on, the pair of kids dug around the exposed hinges, and eventually let the door fall flat open.

"Wizards...," Harry said in disgust as they continued through, "Only a wizard would enchant a key and not think to secure the door."

The next room was a massive chess set with another obvious goal. They were meant to play through. Nym shouting _reducto_ quickly put paid to that idea. They continued on. A dead troll, ten minutes, and two gulps of potion later, they were in what looked like the last room in the dungeon they were in.

The final room was empty, and lit by massive fire running the length of the room at its sides. In the center of the open floor was a large mirror, and a be-turbaned man pacing in front of it. Harry looked at the mirror curiously. _Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi._ The mirror of Erised! Helga spent a decade looking for this, something about enchanted passive legilimency. He quickly refocused on the man in front of it.

What the hell, Harry thought, who knew Quirrell was competent enough to even be capable of being evil?

Harry and Nym were both summarily bound and silenced. In retrospect, they both figured that being subtle as they ran towards danger was a good idea they both should have had. Overconfidence really felt stupid in retrospect.

Nym looked at Harry, eyebrows raised. Their mouths were uncovered, so she mouthed what looked like 'Well, fuck.'

Harry briefly entertained the notion of running through a 'Bell truck?' comedy routine, but Nym wasn't Neville and so was unlikely to play along. Also they were in life threatening danger or whatever.

The way Harry figured it, they had a few options here. They could test their transformations against the strength of the magical bonds they were in, which had a solid chance of freeing them both, but at the cost of a significant amount of energy and noise. Harry could try silent magic, which was incredibly iffy. If his core chose the moment he tried it to pulse he could end up exploding himself, cutting off his legs, or ripping a portal open to the outer darkness and letting one of the material representations of chaos through into this plane of being. There was a reason that folks weren't taught silent casting until they were past OWL age. Harry decided to put that one down as a maybe. The Potter blade, forged by the hand of the king of all the Goblins of Albion himself for Harry and his line down to eternity, would also really get him out of this bind. If only Harry had it on him instead of next to his socks in his trunk. He resolved to not make that mistake again too. This was turning into a big learning experience that he really hoped to survive.

As he thought furiously, Quirrell was talking to himself and gesturing with increasing vigor and anger. The silencing spell placed over the kids worked in both directions, so as they watched him talking they heard nothing.

A minute passed from the moment of their capture, then two. Quirrell looked like he was having some kind of psychotic episode, and Harry was approaching his decision. Quirrell had been stupid enough to bind them without disarming them, so he was just going to try a silent cast _diffindo_ and hope for the best.

He took a few seconds to move his wand experimentally and see what kind of range of motion he had. His quick test revealed that the bindings around him were so tight that all he could do was move his wand laterally a centimeter or two. It wasn't a lot, but it might be enough for a flick, which would help direct the spell. Harry drew a breath and closed his eyes in concentration, from a place deep in his mind he shouted the incantation.

The ropes around him parted silently and easily, he could feel that, so odds were the spell didn't go too far afield. He opened his eyes to see the rest of the damage. Beside him the ropes around Nym fell to the ground, and in front of him the turban around Quirrell's head also were rent in twain.

Nym took a step forward and fell directly on her face. It looked like the spell had cut all the laces on her trainers as well. Based on that, it looked like the spell had targeted any wound rope or fabric in the vicinity. Harry breathed a sigh of relief, given the stuff that happened around him the whole chaos god in the middle of Hogwarts thing wasn't crazy.

Nym regained her feet and the kids redirected their focus on the man in front of them, only to find something truly terrifying. Quirrell was on the ground scrabbling at the remains of his turban, and burned into what looked like necrotic tissue at the back of his head, was another face. A face with glowing, burning red eyes, nostrils that belonged to a snake, and wide smile. Staring directly at the pair.

The silencing charms fell, and the friends heard, "Ahhh! How good it feel to have the air plain upon my skin. Wouldn't you agree, Harry Potter?"

Somehow the exact same thought fell through the jumbles that were the thoughts of both Harry and Nym, "Aw shit." It seemed like it would be a night for cursing, linguistic and magical as it were.

Quirrell's body stopped its mad search for the remnants of his turban. The man's arms and legs both turned in their sockets with retch inducing cracks and pops. Both kids were physically capable of such a feat, but seeing a non-metamorph do it filled them with a strong desire to lose their respective lunches.

"Do you see what you and your petty low-born mother have reduced me to? I must live here, on the back of a dead man's face. Taking another's body, burning out another's core, just so I can walk again..."

The grotesque face on the back of the now former professor's head continued its somewhat mad ramblings. Harry, having seen a James Bond movie before, knew well what the walking remains of what could only be Voldemort was spouting.

"Argh! Here is my master plan, you're a fool, and I'll defeat you!"

Harry found that, in the moment, he was actually pretty disappointed that life imitated art. He met Nym's gaze while the Dark Lord waxed poetic. Harry twitched his head back towards where they came from and mouthed 'mum'. She inclined her head to the dark lord in the room, her brow indicating that it was a bigger deal than their mum. Harry rolled his eyes, indicating his wrist, and twitching back to the route they took in. Nym rolled her eyes, turned on her heel and left.

Harry redirected his attention back to the madman pacing back and forth.

"...POWER! In the end it's all about power. Those who seize it, and those too weak to do so. Your pathetic family was much the same, your mother had the greatest potential of her generation, your father had such power, but both were too weak to seize what they could have had!"

Harry paused for a moment to take in what he was seeing. There was actually a madman in front of him ranting about taking over the world. When did his life get so surreal? He wanted to blame Amelia, but she saved him so he couldn't quite bring himself to.

Sigh.

The question now was: should he act like a human being, or should he lean into the punch and go full wizard on this one?

Harry glanced at the mirror behind the crazy person in front of him. How was he going to get the idiot's attention? He just needed to keep whatever thing Voldemort here was after away from him and...

His appearance in the mirror looked down and removed a blood red stone from his pocket, before putting it back. Harry immediately felt a weight rest in his formerly empty pocket. Mother fucker! What was Dumbledore thinking? All you had to do to get what Voldemort was after was to want to keep it away from him? Harry didn't even know what it was, so he now had an unidentified magical object in his pocket being sought by a megalomaniacal self-styled dark lord. You literally could not make this shit up, he thought. Harry wanted to punch something in frustration.

Hey look, an evil wizard.

Harry focused, his eyes closing from the effort, every ounce of his attention moving down into his right arm and fist. His bone and muscle density across his whole body rested at a comfortable threefold increase over human norm, but with the magic he was pouring into his arm and fist it jumped to somewhere between ten and twenty times. He deadened the nerve endings all the way to his elbow, and on a whim transfigured his knuckles into brass.

After a brief moment of thought, Harry considered himself very lucky that Voldemort was entirely insane. If he was being serious about this, Harry would be dead. He had made a number of huge mistakes that Voldy didn't take advantage of. Maybe it was the fact that Quirrell didn't have a lot of grey matter to deal with in the first place, maybe being kicked out of a physical form did something to one's mental stability. Who knew?

Harry crossed the distance between them in an instant, Voldemort had never stopped pacing so he timed his move for the away facing part of his route. A single punch caved in Quirrell's face, broke through the possessed man's skull and stopped halfway through the head. Wherever his fist made contact with the now twice dead man's flesh, there was a fizzling and it seemed to be turning to ash. Harry wrote it off as the effect of the amount of magic he was pouring into his fist.

He removed his fist, and using his offhand _scourgify_ -d his bloody hand. The professor's body lay on the ground in front of him, a black mist seeping from its pores and coalescing in front of Harry.

There was an ethereal scream of pain, and the mist seemed to sweep up into itself, then fly directly out of the room through a wall.

Harry sighed again. His mum was gonna be _so_ mad.

It took half an hour, but Harry caught his breath and brought his form back to human normal, repairing some of the minor damage to himself. With a sense of foreboding, he brought the body of Quirrell up to the school.

What felt like days ago, he and Nym had been leaving lunch to talk to Hagrid. A quick tempus revealed that dinner was now in full swing, so this was probably going to be good. Nym left to get Amelia, she probably went to Hagrid's place and used his floo, so if he was really lucky there would be a DMLE presence in the great hall. If he was unlucky he would be entering a hall full of kids with a dead professor in his arms and no reasonable explanation for how it happened. He did have an explanation, but nothing about a sentient castle alerting him to the presence of a dark lord who he killed with a single punch felt reasonable, even to him.

As it was, there were no aurors in the hall. So when Harry kicked the door open because his hands were full of dead guy, almost two thousand eyes belonging to almost a thousand kids turned to him.

 _Poop-biscuit_ was about the only thought of any coherence in his head. Now it was terrible explanation time.

"Professor Quirrell was possessed by Voldemort, the castle directed me to him, we fought and I won. Ummm... He died."

You could have heard subtleties and nuances in the noise of a pin dropping in the hall.

In a strange turn of events, Ronald Weasley was the first to gather his wits (Harry wondered if that expression counted for a man without wits, but whatever), "Bones murdered a professor!"

"Did you not just hear me? He was possessed by Voldemort! I had to fight him at the end of that weird obstacle course on the third floor."

"Why should we believe you?"

Harry desperately wanted to sigh, but doing so again would make him feel like an emo and he wouldn't stand for that kind of behavior. He needed his mum, she was an adult who would listen to him and trust him. She also would run some diagnostics over the corpse in his arms before jumping to conclusions. Worst case scenario, she would make sure he got a comfortable cell while he was arraigned. This is really what you get when you listen to the mental projections of a sentient magical castle.

Now Harry needed a way to shove attention off the dead guy in his arms and what he freely admitted was his pretty clear guilt. There were a thousand people in this room. This could go south really fast, and not, as his mind idly noted, just because he was standing at the southernmost portion of the hall. It took a beat of silence for Harry's brain to kick in and realize the one totally true thing he could do to get himself out of this.

Maaaaaan, he really didn't want to do this.

In an instant he shifted his scar to his forehead, dropping the dead guy he was carrying he raised a hand to his bangs, lifting them to reveal the scar beneath.

"Why do you think you should trust me about killing Voldemort? I dunno mate, maybe because I'm Harry _Bloody_ Potter."


	13. The Heat Thickens

Chapter Twelve: The Heat Thickens

Harry lowered his hand from his forehead, and the hall around him erupted in whispers. Behind him he heard footsteps from easily a dozen individuals. At the head of the hall, the staff table was filled with gasping and a truly maddening volume of twinkling. Harry turned, corpse still in front of him, to find his mum standing not five meters from him, arms crossed and an incredibly angry expression on her face.

This was gonna be a looooong night.

Aurors flooded the hall, and as it turned out, Harry's estimate of the number of people behind him had been a tad low. Amelia ordered the staff rounded up and brought together in the antechamber at the end of the hall, directed what appeared to be a man cloaked entirely in grey to the body at her son's feet, and announced loudly that no student was to leave at the moment.

A pair of aurors were halfway to the staff table when Dumbledore stood and began, "I am Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, and I demand to-"

Amelia shot in, a mild _sonorus_ giving her the edge over the older wizard, "And I am Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. You'll find we're all equal in the eyes of the law," an auror came up on either side of Harry, one taking his wand and the other taking him aside, "A student reported that one of the professors had been possessed by the spirit of Voldemort, and I have just now witnessed my own damn son admit to having been involved in the death of a professor," the whispered _idiot_ under her breath managed to carry fairly well, "I am recusing myself from the investigation, but I am here to make sure that an investigation does take place and no one throws political weight around to stop anything."

The auror escorting Harry brought a son to his mum, and all around the hall aurors took position. Amelia cancelled her _sonorus_ and turned to her son, at a whisper that didn't carry, "I hear that the elves have shepard's pie tonight, why don't we go see... errr... Pointy and grab a bite while you explain to me why the hell Nymphadora ran into my office out of breath yelling about Voldemort before collapsing."

Harry barked out a laugh, "In my defense, I knew she couldn't handle the chemical changes and told her not to follow me. I'm kinda surprised she made it to your office. I know you said it was a defence, but the auror bullpen is a friggen maze."

Under light guard the pair walked down to the kitchen. Behind them a fourth grey cloaked figure appeared soundlessly net to the other three, and it too began waving it's wand over the body of the professor. Gender, race, stature, and identity may all have been obscured, but anyone could see the group looking confused and worried.

Among the students, Fred Weasley gave George Weasley a galleon, the final identity of the kid labelled 'Prongslet' having been confirmed and their yearlong bet completed. The exchange accomplished, the pair walked to the nearest auror to add their two knuts on why the former defense professor had a man named Riddle piggy backing on him intermittently.

The staff was less than pleased when confirmation came down that they had been working with Voldemort all year, and a few particularly mutinous thoughts at their boss's lack of reaction to the news.

* * *

There were two more weeks in the Hogwarts schedule, and when Nym got out of the hospital wing the day after the big DMLE invasion (as the students were calling it), the friends got together again.

It had become increasingly annoying to hang out in the library and in the 'Puff common room. No matter where they went Harry was surrounded by whispers, from both the 'he's a murderer' contingent headed by Ron Weasley and the 'he's a liar/coward' contingent headed by Malfoy.

It was unbearable to the point that the group decided to just meet in Ravenclaw's secret room. It answered whatever kinds of changes they wanted or needed from it, so in all honesty it was probably _the_ ideal study place to begin with. They revised for their tests, and when those were finished and suitably destroyed by the collected knowledge of the friends, they spent time there to escape from the student body.

Harry was entirely unaffected by the stares and whispers, as was Nym, but the rest of the group was slowly going mad. It was well known that Harry was a metamorph, so they knew that he could be anyone at any time. In his stead the student body had taken to following and staring at his friends who did have a consistent form. Inside three days Neville was idly tossing about the idea of murder, by the time the friends were taking thestral drawn carriages to the Hogsmeade station even the normally passive Hermione was talking about setting the line on their reaction just on the other side of physical harm.

"I think stinging hexes are fair game if you hear your name in the whispers."

"I'm not sure if we physically contain enough magic to be able to do that and not be out with exhaustion by lunch," Susan countered.

Hannah tried the optimistic approach, "Maybe by next year they'll have calmed down about the whole Harry Potter thing."

Neville just laughed, not even bothering to shift his gaze from the window, "Calm down my as- OW! I mean I find it highly doubtful they'll calm down," he finished, looking at Hermione with a hurt expression.

Harry and Nym were competing to turn fingers into different metals, Nym winning with silver while Harry could still only manage bronze. He threw his lot into the conversation, "I don't know what your problem is, I don't get stared at."

Hermione turned a baleful glare to the boy, "Cheater."

"What was it I heard that Weasley twin say the other day," Harry countered, "If you've got it, flaunt it?"

She harrumphed, the friends laughed, Hedwig preened on Harry's shoulder in a smug way.

* * *

The results of the DMLE investigation were just beginning to be felt. Normally incursions onto Hogwarts grounds were blocked by the Chief Warlock, and could only be done with the permission of the Minister of Magic himself. Minister Fudge had shouted a little upon Amelia bursting into his office, but had quickly added his consent to hers when he was informed.

The Department of Mysteries had reported that the body Harry dragged up to the great hall had been filled with Voldemort's essence. Despite the hole Harry had left in the head, they found that it was in fact the body of Quirinus Quirrell. The face on the wrong side of the head matched pictures and reports of Voldemort during the war, and their investigation found that the way he had gained possession and changed the orientation of the limbs, Quirrell was completely dead before Harry took his body out of commission.

Their report had found traces on the body of a number of rituals, binding, healing, and strengthening. They found massive scarring all over the body, it had been hit with a large array of spell fire, not in the least the spells that Harry told his mum about firing off on a dreary night in the Forbidden Forest. The body had evidently been driven off by a number of unicorns before it could find one to feed, especially if the number of scars indicating it had been skewered were any indication.

The magical signature associated with the body had been taken by the DMLE investigators before the Department of Mysteries had taken possession of the body, and it had been tracked to a wide number of crimes and missing person reports along a near straight line path from Hogwarts to a forest long believed to be haunted in Albania. In fact, the deeper they looked into things, the more it added up. Voldemort had been reduced to a shade. Not living, not dead, less than a poltergeist, more than a ghost.

With Harry's permission, the entire investigation and the conclusion of it were all hidden under the umbrella of the affairs of a Most Ancient and Noble House. An unspeakable liaison agent, codenamed Wilhelm III, assured the DMLE that the Department of Mysteries would be continuing an investigation under their improved security standards.

There would be preparations, rituals researched, people trained, spells practiced. It seemed as though the Department of Mysteries would be recruiting for the first time since the end of 1981. Following the capture of Augustus Rookwood in the spring of '82, the department underwent a complete purge from the top down, resulting in the capture of two more death eaters and agents from the underground Bolshevik ministry and the wizarding corps loyal to the Peoples Republic of China. Due to their separation from the laws and procedures of the rest of the British ministry, they were able to snag everyone regardless of familial connections.

In every way the Department of Mysteries was the only place where preparations for a return by Voldemort could happen.


	14. A Real Surprise Party

Chapter Thirteen: A Real Surprise Party

* * *

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore sat back in the chair behind his desk. It had been a tough year. His familiar jumped with a single flap of his wings from his customary perch to the old wizard's chair, butting his head against his master's in commiseration.

He reserved this time, the day after the students got onto the Hogwarts express and returned home, to go over the semester that had passed and evaluate all that had happened. In the last few years, he sat and had a small glass of fire whisky with his familiar. Why Fawkes liked the stuff he didn't know, but it was a treasured moment for the pair.

In the last few years, things had all been rolling up Dumbledore. Severus kept the den of snakes appeased. Albus let him go and subtly encouraged him in his favoritism and normal behavior. The odd compulsion charm kept him heading in the right direction, and kept the social atmosphere of Britain's young in line. Cunning and ambitious behavior was shunned, the ones nominally responsible for it were dreadfully out of practice. None of his students would rise to be real threats to his plans for the United Kingdom and its people.

He had managed to keep the lions down by placing people like Percy Weasley in charge, his careful pruning of the "world renown" (even he had to admire his public relations work sometimes) Hogwarts library kept the Ravens from doing anything of note. The Badgers were the only ones with any kind of competence before the 1991-1992 year, and he had managed to make them the universally mocked house. Even if people like Cedric Diggory were actually decent wizards, being Hufflepuffs would haunt their CVs for the rest of their lives after his careful preparations.

This year things had been different. The fiery drink he shared with his fiery companion was one of commiseration not celebration.

It had started at the end of July. The magic invested in the castle identified and sent off letters to every magic user in the British Isles on their eleventh birthday. He had pursued a strictly hands off approach regarding Harry Potter, his future weapon and martyr, since that delightful day in '81. Even so, He couldn't stop himself from waiting outside his deputy headmistress' office (many assumed his responsibilities had led him to give her so many of his duties at Hogwarts, truth be told the castle had simply stopped reporting to him shortly after a certain staff interview in '79), to see what mail she had to deliver on the Thirty-First.

She had no mail.

He watched her carefully every day for the next month, and besides the normal several letters to family's he knew of and muggleborns he would soon begin molding, there was no mention of the Potter heir. He had spent years making careful plans, Hagrid would take the boy to Diagon on the day the Malfoy's traditionally went. A disillusioned headmaster would follow and a few well-placed compulsions would ensure a confrontation. The half-giant would carelessly drop far too many hints about the boy to the public, and the seed would be planted for the first test he would give the boy of his abilities and feelings on Voldemort. The presence of the aforementioned dark lord had been assured with carefully planted tales of the elixir of life in the ears of an incompetent muggle studies teacher who had been persuaded to visit a certain Albanian forest.

But she had no mail.

Then there had been the whole deal with the sorting. No Harry Potter had been sorted, despite being called out. He had hoped that some minor mistake had been made, but no one looking like James or Lily had been among those to be sorted. Then Harry Bones made an appearance. Albus had been on the alert for the boy, anyone bound to a phoenix was to be watched, but he had taken an inheritance test (and how much work had he gone through to get those to fall out of style?) and was apparently the heir to a number of ancient families (and how the boy like to use it). Of course the boy had to go and be a metamorph, changing his appearance to look exactly like James had at that age, but without the runic scar that had been left on a certain small orphan's head.

He had his suspicions and wanted nothing more than to delve into the youngster's mind, but the boy's adopted mother had to be Amelia Bones. One of the only 'Puffs to overcome the world he had so carefully crafted. Albus dared not try to read the boy's mind now, not only was he sure to know of legilimency, but with a connection like Amelia, Albus would have to call in too many favors to work himself clear of the resulting charges.

Harry then turned out to do a veritable prodigy. As a metamorph, his excellence in transfiguration was to be expected, but when he turned around and excelled in charms, potions, and herbology, Albus didn't know what to do. History, defense, and astronomy were all joke classes, largely due to his influence, and the boy managed to do well in those too. He didn't even know where to start on Halloween.

The only bright spot was his inclusion of the muggleborn Hermione girl in his circle of friends. She, thankfully, could be read and influenced without worry. His readings of her during dinners and the occasional soon forgotten meeting kept Albus abreast of much of what the Boy was doing. Try as he might though, he could never seem to get to Rowena's secret room. He always seemed to get a room filled with chamber pots.

Then, as the year ended, the boy went and killed his little voldemort experiment. And revealed himself to be none other than Albus' own lost little boy. A whole semester of influence gone, and more than that, what he had thought of as him throwing a little weight around at some high-minded lost scion turned around on him. He couldn't hope to pull off the benevolent grandfather routine on Potter now.

A year that was supposed to see him 'rescue' the boy and cement some influence probably could have ended worse, but honestly he wasn't sure how. Albus raised his glass and took another bracing swig. Fawkes on the desk beside him dipped his head into his customized wide mouthed glass.

He would have to spend this summer re-thinking things. The long plan had called for securing and cementing his influence entirely in the boy for the next few years until he could get Karkaroff and Maxime to sign off on the tournament. Then Voldemort would rise and the game would be afoot once more.

Yes, he decided as he finished what would be the first of many glasses that night, he had some planning to do.

* * *

Harry's first night back home was excellent. Before he had gone to Hogwarts he had two weeks as Harry Potter, and they were spent with his mum figuring out how deep a hole he had found himself in. He had been nominally free during yule break, but he had things to do then and limited time. Now he had two full months free to figure out what it actually meant to be Harry Potter. With some real time off, he could do now what he hadn't been able to since he found out his name, he could truly figure out who he was. In that vein, there was one free living person who could tell him about his birth parents and who could tell him about the life he might have had. Harry's summer project was to track down Remus Lupin. Harry knew his mum would understand. He was a Bones. He loved being a Bones. As long as he had agency in that decision (and by the gods that would be until he died) he would never change, but he was also a bit more than that. And he needed to figure that second bit out.

It wasn't as if he hadn't learned some things about himself during the year, he did have most of the family journals after all. Potters had a kind of hereditary madness driving them all to what his father had called marauder-like behavior, and it turned out his bad hair was the result of an ancient gypsy curse placed on the Potter line in the early third century and not, as he had feared, merely the result of bad personal grooming habits. Gryffindor and Hufflepuff were each a kind of proto-potter, their combination firming what would become his own crazy line. His birth mum's journals had spoken of an uncle Harry thought had it right. He was keen on describing himself and what he called 'his kind' as too weird to live and too rare to die.

He needed Remus though to give him a living account of who he should have been, especially since the Goblins had reported no headway on the Sirius front.

The public would know soon, if they didn't already, that he was alive. Rather, he supposed, that Harry Potter was alive and active. Calling noble house privileges (and twenty-seven percent ownership) on the Daily Prophet had kept his name out of the most widely read paper in wizarding Britain, but with the child population of the same both owning owls and returning home, people would now know. He expected to receive a few hundred owls in the next few days. Owl redirection, really any kind of communication interference, was unfortunately one of the only branches of magic forbidden from even the old houses.

Messing with communication lines was forbidden by laws dating back to the time of Merlin and Camelot. Back then apparition hadn't been in wide use, there was no floo network, and portkeys were brand new. A single owl could mean the difference between life and death, or the start of a war, or even a blood feud. As methods became more sophisticated, portkeys were made easier and apparition safer, the advent of the floo network as well took most of the urgency out of most communication. The laws were kept on the books though, partly out of pureblood dogma, partly out of laziness, and partly because owl post was still a critical part of wizarding infrastructure. The ICW was funded mostly off breeding and training certifications after all.

When a week had passed and he only received notes from Neville complaining about the mail he got for knowing Harry, and Hermione thanking whatever gods were listening for a ministry ban on howlers to firstborn residences, his suspicions were raised. Amelia hit the DMLE books to find the correct diagnostic charms ( correctly identifying any form of cast magic, as a rule, being orders of magnitude more complex than the casting of said magic), and after performing them on her son found that he was under a number of significant post redirections and blocks.

Unless a person had personally met and been greeted by Harry Potter as Harry Potter, they couldn't send mail to him. Harry's eventual formal adoption as Harry Bones meant that list of people was further obscured, making the actual number of people who could send him mail boil down to his mum, Andi, Hagrid, and his five friends. The old Potter (and likely other, now that they formally knew who all he was heir to) blood wards made it potentially even more complicated, as intention based protections as old as the founders prevented anyone meaning him harm from even remembering who he was without a similar personal introduction. If the collected magic of Hogwarts wasn't stronger and more ancient than whoever had put the blocks on him, Harry likely wouldn't have even seen his acceptance letter.

They contracted out to a cursebreaker Master Rel recommended to break the redirection wards on him, but at the cursebreaker's direction, the family decided to modify the wards and not break them.

William Weasley, or Bill as he promptly insisted he be called, brought up the good point that as much as they may hate the fact that the wards were cast without anyone's consent, they had more than likely saved Harry from any number of cursed objects and kidnapping attempts over the years. Amelia could have kicked herself for not thinking of that. In all honesty, they had more trouble with illegally made and mailed portkeys than anything else. Not to mention the rather terrifying number of substances, even excluding active poisons, which could affect a person with only minor skin contact.

It would be difficult, but Bill worked out how the mail wards could be tied directly into the blood wards Harry had on him. The intention based warding could, with some tremendously complicated arithmancy, be brought into the redirection wards, making it so Harry could only receive mail that was incapable of harming him.

It took two weeks, but by the end Harry was more secure than he had been before. Bill refused payment for his services, the now outlawed family blood wards were extensive and outrageously redundant. The opportunity to actually study them would give him an edge in his own work that few could really hope to match. In his time spent working with Harry and the family, he also spent more than a few hours apologizing for his youngest brother. Ron, it seemed, was as much of a delight at Hogwarts as he was at home.

When all of his mail and warding problems were resolved, it was the twenty third of June, and Harry began project 'Find Remus'.

* * *

According to public record, the old werewolf had a strange and astounding last decade. After 1981, wherein all of his friends and ties to the world either died or were imprisoned, he spent two years as a shepherd for a mundane farm on the northern coast of Scotland before apparently becoming bored and seeking greener pastures of his own.

In the spring of '84, he moved back into the wizarding world briefly. Gringotts had a record of him going in as additional security on an expedition to find some of the ritual records left behind by Olmec wizards near the Yucatan peninsula. The expedition had run across an underground city filled with inferi animated by the very rituals they thought they were looking for, and promptly broke up.

There were records of a small business loan in the fall of '84 in the mundane world in central Mexico linked to him, where he evidently had tried to start a small professional adventuring business catering to Americans with more money than sense. By all accounts it went really well for him until he discovered during winter '85 that the majority of his clients were using him as a trainer for what they called 'private security' forces and what turned out was closer to corporation sponsored spies that needed the kind of training he gave his clients so they wouldn't die in the jungle ruins he led them to.

He went entirely off the grid for a while, but scattered reports of his whereabouts existed. Harry was thankful, for once, for the magically updating records available in the ministry. For a bit, there were portkey receipts linking him to travels around a few regions in the Himalayas known for their monasteries and martial arts. Later his records contained mundane governmental intelligence reports linking him to appearances in a number of freedom fighter training camps around the edges of the now former Soviet Union.

He apparently got tired of corporate and political games, as he reappeared mid-1989 in the magical world as a bodyguard for hire. His adverts for his skills were hilarious and impressive. It looked like Remus had contacted an advertising firm somewhere, as he included what Harry could only call glamor shots of himself posing in full dragonhide armor and armed with magical as well as mundane weapons. The impressive bits were the number of jobs and skills he had. Remus claimed to be familiar and proficient in the uses of a number of mundane weapons and explosives, as well as having knowledge and training in fighting styles and martial arts associated with cultures across both the mundane and magical worlds. He listed proficiency with a fairly wide variety of mundane transportation methods (how the hell he was trained in the operation of American built Chinook helicopters Harry could only guess) as well as ICW certifications in the creation of portkeys.

As far as Harry could find, he was out on assignment at the moment, working under contract with one of Britain's newspapers. Evidently the chief editor of _The Quibbler_ enjoyed searching personally for some of the crypto-zoological finds his paper advocated, and had hired Remus as a combination guide/bodyguard for himself and his daughter. The contract was public record, but they were evidently away as mail to Remus was returned with notes citing _The Quibbler_ , and mail to the paper was returned citing that the staff was out on assignment.

His research, combined with his normal fun with his friends and family, kept him entirely busy right up until July 31st.

* * *

July 31st, 1992, was going to be a big deal in the Bones household.

Harry hadn't ever really had a birthday since he was adopted by the Bones'. They treated the day of his official adoption, September 7th, as his birthday for the last few years. In his whole life though, Harry had never had any real birthday. The Dursleys had never celebrated anything with him, let alone his birth, and as the person who cooked, cleaned, wrapped presents, and was more often than not physically assaulted at any party the Dursleys held, the idea of a birthday didn't mean anything to him.

This year Susan, Hannah, Nym, and the parents were bound and determined that Harry not only get a birthday party, but he enjoy it. Not only had the boy had a massive impact on all of their lives, but he had managed to take down Voldemort a second time in the past month or so, so as the family saw it, he had earned himself a hell of a party.

They planned out a day filled with what Harry enjoyed. The Family was going to go flying, they were going to spend some time in the main library of the British Goblins (Harry loved learning, and while the negotiations for the visit had taken several days of meetings, Amelia thought it was something that would actually function as a gift for a wizard with more money than he knew what to do with), and they were going to end their day with a long picnic at Stonehenge.

Invitations were extended to everyone Harry liked, Hermione, Neville, Hagrid, Master Rel, Chief Ragnok (who despite his station, managed to correspond with Harry at least a few times a month, evidently he had a soft spot for the young former orphan), and a host of house elves from the Hogwarts staff among others.

Best of all, It was a surprise. Normally it would have been hell keeping everything they were doing away from the normally observant boy, but with all of the permission papers Amelia had to write to get her underage son into the ministry records department, he was so distracted that he had no idea what was up.

Everyone was firmly resolved though, Harry's second real birthday ever would be the party of the decade.

* * *

So it was that Harry was escorted into the ministry early in the morning on the thirty-first. They needed him out of the house at the beginning of the day so they could get everything together. Amelia had said she needed him for something at the office in the morning, and around seven Kingsley Shacklebolt popped over to the Ossuary and brought Harry over to the ministry.

What no one had counted on though, was that July Thirty-first would be the third time in his life so far that the hand of fate would turn in his favor. Two years previously, a twist saw Harry adopted into a family that loved and supported him, and had the clout to see him protected even when he found his true identity. Later that year, fate had Harry looking in the right place, at the right time, to catch a glance through a weakened obscuration charm over a cracked window and witness the torture and eventual death of a phoenix.

Even among the people who knew this day was to be special, no one suspected that luck would find him again.

* * *

That morning, curiously enough, Harry knew he was needed in the ministry, but no one had told him why.

He woke early, made himself something small in the kitchen, said bye to Susan, Hannah, and Nym, (the latter two having slept over the night before) and met Shack at the door.

Whenever he went out these days, he took a different form. Since his stupid reveal of his birth name, the public had been clamoring for him, and he had no intention of being followed around by reporters. Harry honestly felt dumb enough trying to contact _The Quibbler_. Today he gave himself an extra foot and a half, light brown hair, and a plain, angled, no nonsense face. Folks knew he was a metamorph, so if this turned out to be part of the investigation of the whole philosopher's stone incident he could just morph back.

Kingsley approved of his face for the day, and apparated them both over to the ministry. When they arrived in the ministry atrium, his curiosity overcame him.

"Shack, why am I here, mum wouldn't say last night and she left before I was up this morning?"

The older man had to suppress a smile. If he knew his boss in the slightest, she hated being up early in the morning. His orders were to keep Harry out of trouble for a few hours and return with him around ten. Amelia was probably still under her covers snoring.

"I have no idea, kiddo. I'm just an auror, no one tells me anything," he smiled at his charge, "I'm just supposed to get you to the auror break room. They said if they needed you they'd grab you there, and if they didn't I'd come back and grab you around ten."

Harry took a book (he was through the founders and the Potter journals, he was up the Peverells and had Ignotus' journal on him today) from a space expanded pocket, "Good thing I'm prepared for a bit of a wait then, innit?"

They shared a laugh, and Kingsley led him to the room the aurors inhabited when they were trying to not work. He figured he should probably be watching Harry a bit more closely, but he had caught some pureblood jackass taking wallets and purses off of a group of mundanes with a switching spell the day before, so he had some paperwork to do.

The auror break room was a decently sized square room off the hall that Amelia had her office in. It shared a wall with the bull pen where all the aurors had cubicles, so as Harry grabbed a seat near the canteen area, he could her the quiet rumble of people talking and working.

He was going through the journal, idly taking note of some of the enchanting work Ignotus had done between hitting the brothels (the Peverell brothers had each been bachelors until late in their lives, and if their writings were any indicator, they had enjoyed that state thuroughly) and nodding politely to a few aurors as they passed through for tea or coffee.

A strange man sitting alone in the break room wasn't uncommon for them, most aurors met casual contacts in the break room so his presence went unremarked. Unremarked that is, until it hit a quarter to nine and a group of eleven wizards in battle gear came into the room.

The man who looked in charge of the group walked up to where Harry was sitting, "Hey, you the guy waiting for us? From the bust last month?"

Harry put his book down, "I guess, I was just told to wait here until someone came for me. Am I needed for more testimony or something?"

The man, a solid 6' 3" and lightly greying at the temples laughed, "Something like that. We're working a different angle today, I was told you might be here to help us."

Harry stood quickly, "I know how serious it is. This kind of thing should be stopped before it can crop up again. Just tell me what you need me to do."

Waving him along with the group the leader agreed, "You're telling me. Come with us to the briefing and we'll get it all squared away."

Harry joined the group of wizards as they left the break room and headed down the hall. They took a winding route out of auror territory and down to the Department of Mysteries level. The tenth floor was a single obsidian hallway with doors set at intervals for entrance to the various courtrooms and a single unmarked door at the end of the hallway for entrance into the DoM.

They passed through the entrance to the DoM and went straight through what looked like an operations briefing room, where an unspeakable stood at the end of a conference table next to a massive pensieve.

The leader, who had yet to identify himself, walked to the head of the room and slashed at the wall at the end with his wand. A large map of what looked kind of like a warehouse appeared in bright lines on it.

He started talking, "Alright everyone. We all know why we're here and what we're after. We're splitting into teams, yellow," he indicated three men close to the door, "red," three others waved, "and blue," three more men inclined heads at the leader, "I'm with the command team which is myself, Agent Nicholas II," the unspeakable waved cheerily, "and," he sent a questioning look Harry's way.

Harry started briefly, "Harry."

The leader nodded and continued, "Yellow breeches first, followed by red and blue," behind him on the map lines corresponding to the team moved into the warehouse from different sides and covered each of the rooms in turn, "command stays behind. When yellow, red and blue report clear, command moves in to take possession of any artifacts and debrief. Now let's get Harry squared with a dragonhide robe," He looked at him, "Just in case and head out, we know they have an apparition ward so our portkey leaves as soon as we're ready."

The guys from the yellow team took Harry to a room off the side of the briefing room and gave Harry a slightly ill-fitting and very thick full dragon hide robe. It was slightly too large, but as Harry understood these things the only dragon with skin this thick was a Ukrainian Ironbelly, the species whose hide could go as far as absorbing a hit from an unforgivable curse. He couldn't bring himself to complain, choosing instead to broaden and shirnk in a few places to make it fit better.

Their portkey was a long stretch of chain, and it activated as soon as they all made contact with it. Harry was subjected to the normal hooking and flying sensations. Portkeys took their occupants briefly through what firstborn researchers called a pocket dimension (Harry hadn't looked into it too much as he wasn't capable of it for a few years yet), the transition between dimensions being what jarred its users so.

The chain dropped the twelve wizards in front of what was now definitely a warehouse. It stood two stories tall and looked like something from a horror film. The walls were corrugated steel and the small windows set high into the walls had all seen better days. Harry wondered what kind of artifact a wizard like Voldemort would leave here, especially as the whole neighborhood looked like it was near a mundane sea port.

Yellow circled around to the back, Blue moved to the middle of the left side of the building, and red stayed near the three members of the command team. Agent Nicholas II (call me Nick, they had said) cast high powered disillusionments around Harry and himself (herself? itself? how the devil do you refer to an unspeakable, Harry thought).

The commander consulted a large pocket watch, and after about thirty seconds sent a look to the guys from Red team. One began a chant Harry recognized as the beginning of a temporary anti-portkey ward, and the other two counted to three below their breath before releasing a ribbon cutting spell in the shape of a crude gateway and a _depulso maxima_ at the wall next to the door to the place. The metal separated like tin foil and the banishing spell sent it in a clean chunk into the interior of the building.

The members of red team all ran inside after the portkey ward finished. Then Harry started in on the tensest five minutes of his life to date. Whatever old Voldy wanted kept away from people was something they needed, but standing outside a building of men risking their lives for it was a new experience for Harry.

He fidgeted. He ran through every defensive spell he knew, and began trying to think of defensive uses for others. He paced for thirty seconds before realizing it was making a small amount of noise, and settling on his haunches. He actually took Ignotus' journal from his pocket before realizing that not only was he invisible, the book was as well.

It was a long five minutes.

Eventually, a shout came back out from inside the building. Harry had no idea why an incorrect explanation of Gamp's third law of transfiguration was of any importance, but as soon as he heard it the commander stood from where he was crouching behind a massive spool of cable and started inside.

They passed through a few grimy hallways. On the inside the building was made of poorly fitted plaster boards organized into a few hallways around a large unfinished open area. As they made it inside, Harry found out why it was left that way.

The center of the space was absolutely free of rubbish, and had a set of massive rune encrusted copper rings sunk into the middle of it. In the center of the rings was a girl, she couldn't have been any older than Harry was himself, and she was attached to the ground by what looked like sharp and nasty black iron chains. She had beautiful platinum blonde hair, and not a stitch on her. Her skin was covered in small scratches and large bruises. When she looked up at the men surrounding the ritual circle she was in, a black eye stared defiantly out from her pale face.

A small voice came from her, and more than its words the tone spoke of disuse and abuse. It was enough to hurt the men gather around the edges of the circle, several of whom were fathers.

"Que faire?"

The sound shook the unspeakable from its place around the circle. Nick began looking at the rings and muttering to himself. His wand moved in small short jumps as magic began arcing from him to the rings, burning small runes from its surface.

She spoke again, "Que voulez-vous?"

The words stung worse than the waiting had earlier. He didn't know the words, but he remembered that tone intimately. It had been a few years, but it would be centuries before he forgot being that kid surrounded by people trying to hurt him. He didn't speak French, but in this case he didn't have to.

Harry looked at Nick, upon reflection, the only person whose name he actually knew there.

"Can I go in? What is it?," he said, gesturing at the circle.

The unspeakable didn't look up from the rings. He was on the third of five surrounding the girl, the two he finished with each torn from the ground and transfigured into paper for later analysis.

"Binding, you know why we're here. Give me a moment, aaaaaand yeah," he burned out a final rune on the circle, sparing a fast glance at the remaining two, "You can go to her now. I think it's safe."

Harry didn't waste a moment. Three steps brought him to her side, each bringing a distinct flinch from her as he took it. He settled on his knees next to her, and averted his eyes. He remembered being somewhere like this, and feeling weak. The staring hadn't helped him then and wouldn't her now. He summoned a newspaper from a corner of the room, and transfigured it to a set of large and thick robes, which he offered her.

Unseen by either of them, runes in the first and second rings began lighting up as he expended magic inside the circle.

She took the robe from him quickly, her hand darting out and snatching it from his. Harry took that moment to shift back to his normal form, and more than that, he waited for her to meet his eyes before slowly allowing all of the scars he normally hid to come back to the surface where they should have been. He wanted her to understand that he had seen some of these things, so he removed his battle robe (now far too large) and pushed up his sleeves, revealing evidence of some of his more painful experiences.

His left arm was a solid mass of scar tissue from midway down his forearm to his hand, remnants of one of the worst nights of his life, when Dudley discovered matches. Without constant low level use of his magic, the arm would have been almost too stiff from the scar tissue to use. His right arm bore a startling similarity to his right side, displaying the remnants of a number of ugly puncture wounds from thrown rocks, glass and other delights from his childhood.

Neither child heard it, but there were more than a few gasps when Harry shifted back to his base form, and when he revealed some of his own scars there were a few more.

"Er... je... m'appelle Harry."

She looked at him with some suspicion and with deliberate slowness said, "je m'appelle Gabrielle."

Harry stepped closer, and with a whispered _diffindo_ separated her from the dirty and terrible chains tying her to the ground. He turned to the commander, whose shocked expression still plain on his face.

"I don't suppose any of you speak French?"

His confusion plain on his face, "No, that was, well, that was your job. You're not the psychologist then are you?"

"Psychologist? No, I'm twelve, how the hell would I have a degree in psychology? And what does she have to do with Voldemort?"

The commander flinched instinctively, and looked more confused than before, "What do you mean Voldemort? We're here to bust up a ring of extra-national Veela slavers."

Harry looked down and rubbed the back of his head for a moment, "Shit. This is why being a metamorph can suck sometimes."

Shack told him someone would come for him, and these guys were probably told that some guy would be waiting in the break room. He certainly hadn't been the only one waiting there. How did he get himself into these things?

He turned back to the young, well, Veela he guessed. Holding out his hand, he indicated he would help her stand, "Umm... Aurors. Police?"

She seemed to nod and went for his hand, when several things happened at once.

British aurors weren't known for their competence. Sure, when politics didn't get in the way they usually got the right man, and with Amelia at their head they had managed to clean up most of the effects of centuries of nepotism and laziness. Not all of it though, which was how scions of noble houses who didn't know how to properly cast a _stupefy_ occasionally got assigned to high risk missions like the one Harry found himself in.

One side of the ritual room was filled with stunned and disarmed bodies of the men guarding this place, most stacked in a small pile like cordwood. Stunned, that is, until a poorly executed stunner from blue team wore off. Disarmed until the man waking up grabbed his unregistered second wand from the disillusioned holster at his ankle.

Word travels fast through the criminal community, through necessity if nothing else. The now armed man sitting behind a crowd of aurors knew who this 'Harry' was, metamorphs being rare and metamorphs named Harry being decidedly unique. As Harry spoke to the commander and went for the hand of the Veela bitch they had been binding into servitude, he took careful aim, and pouring all his power into his spell aimed at Harry's heart and whispered _defodio_. Killing the boy-who-lived would see him put into prison for the rest of his life, but when someone inevitably broke or bought him out, he would have any job he wanted till he died.

Harry just made contact with the girl, Gabrielle, when the gouging curse painfully tore a hole through his chest and heart. It missed his spine by a pair of centimeters, but still managed to make mincemeat of a large portion of his upper chest as well as a disturbing percentage of his ribs. His blood sprayed over the girl and ground around them, soaking into the remaining ritual circles each of which promptly lit up like a Christmas tree.

As soon as his body found itself without an organ to pump blood, Harry's brain started firing in overdrive. It was a well-known response, when one's body knows it's going to die, it tries to pack the greatest possible amount of awareness and life into the time remaining to it. This physiological response is what is responsible for claims of seeing one's life flash before their eyes and similar claims. Thankfully, to a metamorph with as much knowledge of the human body as Harry had, that was all he needed. As the ritual circle flared into life around Harry and Gabrielle, he focused every ounce of his will and closed every vein, artery, and exposed piece of his insides to stop himself from just instantly bleeding out.

The human brain can survive for around a minute without oxygen before brain cells begin to die, a fact Harry knew very well. He need to solve this problem now, before panic or shock set in and he found himself well and truly screwed. Drawing on every jot of magical energy he possessed, Harry directed his body's entire awareness at the hole in his chest.

A universal truth of magic, and in fact most of human existence, is that you can't get something from nothing. Without eating several pounds of raw protein, Harry simply had no mass to work with. It was straight impossible for him to just make the damage go away. As his awareness and magic coalesced in his gaping chest wound, he proved the old adage true though, where there was a will there was indeed a way.

Usually Harry used a form of internal transfiguration to change his body, now however his energy funneled into an extremely intensive internal conjuration. He wasn't able to do anything as complex as creating a working heart, but skin appeared from thin air, covering the lightly leaking hole through him.

Closing the hole was exactly what he needed though, Harry managed to fully trap all of his blood inside himself, making it so he could afford to relax his control over every individual blood vessel across the hole and focus on solving his circulation problem. He ran massive changes through his circulatory system, creating dozens of small and simple muscle chambers throughout his body, decentralizing how his body pushed blood around. It was inelegant, ugly, an utter hack job, and left the preteen on the wrong side of magical exhaustion, but it would keep him from dying until he could get medical attention.

It was a fight that felt like it lasted for days, but Harry saved himself from dying for the next few minutes at least. A part of him that Harry felt should have been a lot smaller was surprised he was going to make it. When he finished he brought his awareness outside his body to the room at large. He had collapsed into the arms of the tiny Veela he had been trying to help. She had her forehead pressed against his and was whispering to him.

"S'il vous plaît être bien."

Around them, the circles Nicholas had been breaking were engulfed in a holocaust of jade flame. The fire was translucent, and seemed to be burning closer and closer to the two of them in the center. Harry saw it coming, but having just solved one life and death struggle, found that he didn't have it in him to be worried about a second one so soon.

Outside the fire, Harry could barely make out six different men in the process of re-stunning and binding their prisoners. The roar of the now chartreuse flames overwhelmed the sound, but Harry could see the commander looking entirely too frightened and in an argument with the unspeakable. He was the one in the fire, he should be excited about the whole deal, not the commander whose name he still had not picked up. Well, Gabrielle should be concerned about the whole deal too. Wait. Gabrielle.

Harry shifted slightly, putting a small space between them and looking deep into her eyes. He may have thought this was about Voldemort, but honestly he was okay with it ending up being about saving her. Here she had suffered god only knew what, and right when he was trying to help her he went and got his blood and guts shot all over her. And now they were going to be burned in some kind of green ritual fire. He was the worst rescuer ever. Using all his will power and every remaining flake of power in him, Harry lifted his hand and gently brushed a lock of her hair away from her face.

"Hey, sorry about all this. I didn't mean for this, I don't actually think I was even supposed to be here."

She jumped a bit when he spoke, but for the first time seemed to understand what he was trying to say. Harry could feel the fire begin to lap at his extremities, and from her face he could tell she felt it too. The fire felt like it was burning more than just the physical, Harry could feel the fire magically, as if it was burning through his mind as well as his body.

Gabrielle hugged Harry tighter to her chest as more and more of the pair caught fire, each of their awarenesses closed down to just the other as the fire came closer. She put her head against his again and whispered in his ear, "Eet iz okay, Harry. You tried, no?"

The last thing either thought before losing their battles against injury and fire was wonder about how and why she had spoken her last words in English.

* * *

At eight that evening the dining room of the Ossuary played host to a curious and entirely unique congregation of power.

The head of the DMLE sat at the head of the table, to her right was the king of the Goblin nation of the British Isles. Across from his King sat the head librarian of the same Goblin nation with a spread of keystone books linking him to the collected knowledge of his domain. To the librarian's right sat the oldest house elf anyone present had ever seen. The sheer number of wrinkles on Hogwart's head elf's face made him look more like a Shar Pei puppy than a nearly three hundred year old caretaker. Rounding out the set was a high ranking unspeakable, who introduced itself as Agent Imhotep.

The topic of the conversation was how what should have been an epic birthday party for the defeater of the darkest wizard to have lived in the last half dozen or so centuries had ended for the birthday boy in grievous personal injury and a wholly unknown bond to an eleven year old Veela.

A number of people were unhappy.

Amelia's voice, filled with quietly restrained rage, started the conversation, "How the hell did no one even ask for a last name when they picked up my son? That was a high security operation to bust a ring of some piece of shit slavers, and my son managed to just waltz in without anyone blinking. I know he is a metamorphmagus, but… just what the hell?"

The unspeakable fidgeted quietly in its seat, "Our man on the ground made a large number of mistakes. The operation was under my department's supervision so Nick should have confirmed everyone's identity and been more careful, per procedure. Their pre-mission brief took place on the tenth floor and none of the wards around our department tripped so he assumed that everything was in order. Apparently our wards don't cover the case of well-meaning mistaken identity. If Harry had known or even suspected that he wasn't supposed to be there we would have been notified, but Harry thought he knew what he was doing so no ward tripped and nothing happened. We're working on filling the hole in our security, the use of an imperius could theoretically duplicate what happened."

"Griffy wants to know what Harry did to survive injuries. Griffy hears from elves at wizard hospital that he is safe now, but Harry's body is missing his heart," said the wizened elf.

The librarian (His actual name, Shal'kek-Nogorob, translated into English literally as 'The Librarian') perked up at the house elf's question, "I actually have been in contact with the healers at St. Mungos, the nation offered the services of a few of our best and I went there to keep record of what happened. It seems like young Harry was hit with a rather overpowered gouging spell, which cut a chunk from his body, pulping his heart, a large chunk of his upper body, and causing damage to his lungs and some of his upper digestive system. When he arrived the scans run on him showed that he still had a large chunk missing from him, but had managed to seal off his lung damage and appears to have created a number of small heart-like blood pumping chambers distributed through his body. His work appears to be enough to keep him alive while he recovers from the exhaustion he placed himself in by keeping the damage at bay. The examining healers all agree that his fixes were crude, but when he fully recovers if he can refine the system he made, Harry should find himself entirely immune to any form of massive trauma like this again. No higher life form has such a system, so it's efficiency is unknown, but some cave wyrms have a roughly analogous system. We have furnished what information we can."

Amelia and Ragnok each looked sick at the description of the damage Harry had sustained. This would be the second time in his short life that Harry had survived what amounted to a death curse. Even in the historical records that Harry and Nymphadora spent so much time studying there had never been a case of a metamorph surviving so much damage.

Amelia shook the painful images from her head, and heaved a sigh, the librarian continued, "He is stable now, and that is what matters. Evidently the healers have him pumped full of regeneration and nutrition potions. His magic seems to be slowly continuing the work he started. It defies even the nation's best knowledge of the subject, but Harry looks like he should be back on his feet in no more than a week."

"Do we know anything about the ritual, or his bond to this Gabrielle? My men are attempting to track down who she is, but the bastards we caught seem to be protected by unbreakable oaths to one another, and because she's a French national and can't be released to them yet we're running into trouble," Amelia asked.

Ragnok shook his head, "We're attempting to identify her through our French counterparts, but we're running into similar walls. Public inquiries into missing person reports with the French ministry are also being stonewalled. Either she is just some random child and the French are being difficult, or given how completely we are being blocked out she is related to someone very big. Until she and Harry can be safely separated, or Harry can travel with her to France, we're stuck."

"Can they even be safely separated? What do we know about the ritual?"

Imhotep sat a bit straighter, "You all probably know how much of a role intent plays in all rituals, well it goes double for binding. Our agent dismantled a significant amount of the ritual environment before Harry unknowingly activated it, unfortunately that only served to make the final result of the whole thing more unstable. It's difficult for us to truly define how the two kids are linked at this point. From what we have seen, the binding wasn't meant to involve blood of any kind, and it was saturated with the magic-rich blood of a metamorph. That blood alone is enough of a free agent in the whole deal that we can only guess what the result is. I have a full team working through the arithmancy of what happened. We know what was active in the circle before he made magical and physical contact from pensieve memories, and we have a small sample of his blood that we can evaluate. It's an immensely complicated process, but we may have an idea in a few weeks. Honestly, when Harry recovers and the two can talk to us we'll have a much better idea of what is up. At the moment they are both in identical magically induced comas, and when they are not in physical contact both of their vital statistics start dropping."

The house elf stood on his chair, giving him an extra six inches and calling attention to himself, "Griffy thinks he may know something. House elveses know a lot about bindings. We's all need to be bound to people or places to have magic, so we has much experience with it. Normally when bad people try to bind Veelas they use a slave bond. The bonder person wants to enslave, there is being an act of control. When Harry cut her chains and offered her robes, thats opposite of control. His magic started ritual with acts of compassion and freeing. Griffy think if theys be bound, it's because the little girl wants to be bound. Griffy spent time with Harry at Hoggywarts, Harry powerful, but not enough, Griffy thinks, to have done all he did. Harry had to conjure parts for himself on the inside with no wand, and he had to conjure a lot of parts. If Griffy had to guess, little girl bound herself to Harry and gave some power to him so he could save himself."

The rest of the group exchanged thoughtful looks. That would explain a lot. The need for a physical connection between the two was something that wasn't common to any binding ritual, legality aside, that any of them were familiar with. If Gabrielle had forged a magical connection to Harry to share power with him, it made sense that they would need to keep a connection going so their cores could stabilize after having been drained.

The Librarian passed around a few of his keystone books paged to similar historical examples, and the group spent the rest of the night trying to find parallels. By the time they separated, no headway had been made.

It looked like they were just going to be waiting until Harry and his new friend woke up.


	15. Best Nap Ever

Chapter Fourteen: Best Nap Ever

* * *

Depending on one's your perspective, the estimate put forward by The Librarian for how long it would be before Harry was back on his feet was either spot on or off by a week. Even decades later the best conclusion Harry could reach, regarding not just this event but really most of his life, was that magic was a funny thing sometimes.

Harry and Gabrielle lost consciousness when they were fully engulfed by the flames of the ritual they had inadvertently begun. When it finished moments after they both passed out, the members of Red team brought down all of the transport wards around the warehouse and immediately portkeyed the two unconscious children to the ministry's DMLE emergency ward of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

Healers began scanning and diagnosing mere moments after the pair arrived. There was a major panic among the on call staff when the first round of scans showed that the kids were each magically exhausted to a dangerous degree, and what's more the boy was actively missing a heart in addition to a significant internal chunk of his upper torso.

They started a controlled version of absolute 'the sky is falling' terror. Skin was present over the whole wounded area, and once a gentle cleansing charm was applied, it was clear that no blood was escaping the injured region. Instead, there was a void inside the boy's body where a heart, a number of bones, and the upper portion of his left lung should have been.

The longer they stared at Harry and attempted to figure out a course of treatment for a straight up missing heart, the lower his vitals dropped. The longer they worried the worse he got. Eventually the senior healer on the ward declared that they needed the boy in an observation room so they could get more precise information about what was going on. They dumped Harry into the gurney occupied by Gabrielle and one of the junior healers ran them down to one of the hospital's intensive care rooms. When they ran more diagnostic charms on him in the new room, they found he had actually gotten better since the last scan. When the results repeated themselves over the next half hour, only getting worse for the five minutes Gabrielle was removed from his side to be changed into hospital garb, they found their pattern.

Amelia was soon by her son's side, a breathless auror having sprinted from the Department of Mysteries to her office. She watched as the magic of the observation room had quills moving back and forth across a ream of parchment. Each new line was watched with equal fervor by the medics and the mother. The full list of her son's injuries was staggering. Of interest to everyone though was how his body seemed to be stitching itself back together, slowly to be sure, but none the less on the macro scale and in real time.

In the end, they filled Harry full of skele-grow, muscle, and organ regeneration potions as well as a few blood replenishers for good measure. They saw the changes He made to his body to survive the damage he took, near two dozen new and small muscle chambers lined the major arteries of his body, forcing blood along his circulatory system. Evidently his body considered that state his new normal as the potions seemed to be regenerating into it. The healers, concerned parent, and after a short while, collected friends, could only sit back and wait.

What they saw wasn't necessarily all that was happening though.

* * *

As far as either of the two kids were aware, they regained consciousness about four hours after they passed out. Gabrielle must have come to first as Harry woke to a gentle mental poke.

He felt like he mumbled and turned a bit, and when the poking persisted he woke fully, sitting up and looking around.

Harry was sitting on an island of grass, a small tent lying to one side with a cheery fire burning in front and what appeared to be a large bush covered in yellow blossoms being the only occupants beside Gabrielle and himself. The island couldn't have been more than a hundred square meters, and seemed to be floating in the air. Clouds passed slowly and silently around the spit of land.

It was a place that reeked of peace.

"Where the hell are we."

Coming from Harry the way it did, it was more resigned statement than question. An answer you have to have, but don't really want.

Gabrielle understood, and her reply was simple, "Oui. Merde."

The pint sized Veela was seated cross legged next to Harry as he woke. The boy soon stood up and left her side though, taking a quick walk to the edge of their apparently floating landmass to see what kind of environment they were in. There didn't appear to be any kind of ground, or any kind of bottom, beneath the kid's floating island. Their only company in the sky, a set of clouds moving seemingly without wind and in opposing directions.

Harry returned to his spot near Gabrielle, "I don't suppose you know what's happened?"

He spoke with a half-grin. This was honestly par for the course. Being jaded to the weird was something that came with the life he led. For her part, Gabrielle seemed to feel a similar way, though Harry could tell a lot of it was bravado for her, "Non, I woke up here just a few moments before I woke you up. It does not feel like real life though."

Harry agreed as he poked and prodded at the skin covering where his massive wound should have been.

"Do you think we're dead?"

The light in whatever place they were glinted beautifully off of her hair as she shook out a negative, "I do not think so. I think we activated the ritual those dogs were preparing. Obviously we changed many things though."

Harry looked at her curiously, "What do you mean?"

She had to visibly steel herself to answer and Harry felt an intense compulsion to hug her and try to relieve some of whatever terrible thing she had to be feeling, if it was what he feared, that might not be welcome though.

"Those bastards kidnapped me. They took me from my mother and father. I hear your police officers tell you, I am Veela. What they were trying to do was a kind of binding ritual, I think. Like a permanent _imperius_. They would have... sold me. You and your police stopped the ritual, but when your blood spilled out in the circle, I think we completed what they began."

As she gave her short account of what she thought happened, before his eyes, her skin took on the bruises it had back from where they had been before they woke up here. She hugged her knees to her chest, and soon her clothes disappeared again like they had outside wherever they were now, ritual paint appearing smudged in places around her head.

Harry saw how beat up she was, and he recognized it. He had those wounds too once. The shape and angle of some of them were exactly the shape of some of the scars he still carried, the kind you got when you were assaulted by more than one person and were trying to fight back. She was strong, he could tell in an instant, the fact that she sported wounds like the ones she had and was still put enough together to talk was damn impressive.

Harry cast around for anything he could use as a blanket or a handkerchief for her, he wanted to be able to do anything to make her feel better, but had no idea what to do. As he looked around, right before his eyes appeared a soft blanket. He stood and grabbed the (conjured from nowhere?) objects. Gabrielle cringed away at first, but he put the blanket around her and got the handkerchief into her hand.

"I'm sorry. For whatever its worth, as much as I like the fact that I don't have a big hole in me in this place," he glanced about, afraid for a moment to tempt fate by citing his no longer missing pieces but nonetheless resolute, "I would do it again as many times as needed to try and make you safe from that."

Gabrielle practically leapt from beneath her blanket to Harry, bringing her arms around him and hugging him for all she was worth, "I know, Harry. I am Veela, I can tell. It is why I chose to complete the bond with you. You cut the ties from me to the circle, I was free. When you were hurt though, I could feel your magic calling out for help. I finished the ritual on my end so I could give you some of my magic to make you safe. I cry because I am afraid, for you and for myself."

Harry quickly responded to her hug with a fierce one of his own, "It will be okay. Wherever we are, we're away from that scum that tried to do that to you, and we're together. We can survive this."

Gabrielle started a less tense and somewhat relieved chuckle, "Here I am hugging you, you saved me and I saved you, and yet I do not even know your name. You cannot be just Harry, no?"

They gently disengaged from their contact, somewhere in the hug her clothes had reappeared, and the bruises all over her disappeared again. Harry laughed a bit as he answered, "It's kinda funny you should ask that. My full name is kinda complicated, it turns out I'm the last of a bunch of family lines, I'm Harry James Gryffindor-Hufflepuff-Peverell-Potter-Bones. Technically I'm a lord three times over and an heir once. My sister is the heir to the Bones line. I was adopted into it after my mum found out how my old family was abusing me."

Gabrielle looked amazed for a moment, "Wait, Harry Potter? I was saved by Harry Potter? I saved Harry Potter? Mon dieu."

It had distracted her further from how she had been feeling a few moments ago, so Harry was more than willing to absorb some boy-who-lived crap.

"I'm guessing my reputation precedes me."

"Oui, you are famous across the world! Did you not know? The Dark Lord had many followers across the world. Since his fall we have done much to clean our system, but we still remember what you did and what you lost with his death," Her face was a mix of adoration and seriousness. Harry thought it was still better than most brits, few of whom ever remembered what victory had cost.

Gabrielle shook her head, as if to clear thoughts of him from her head before she introduced herself, "I am Gabrielle Victorie Delacour, my father is Jean-Pierre Delacour, French Minister of Magic, my mother is Appoline Aimée Delacour, daughter of the matron of the largest Veela clan in Europe and Asia," then her mind caught up to her mouth, "... wait... abused?"

Harry gave a short laugh, he had half hoped that one would slip past her. Deciding to just go for broke (he was apparently stuck in an inexplicable location with a girl he had inadvertently engaged in some kind of bonding ritual with, really what could he lose by letting loose at this point?) he returned all of his scars to their correct locations. Harry went to remove his shirt to show her some of the finer points of his childhood when his shirt disappeared. Gabrielle gasped, bringing her hand to her mouth.

"I'm a metamorphmagus. I don't know if the news internationally carried that. For some reason the magic won't let me just get rid of my scars, so I move and compress them into the small of my back where they usually go unnoticed. I brought out some of the more visible one earlier to try and show you that I've been through some tough times too," Harry trailed off, more than a little embarrassed by the patchwork of scar tissue covering his body.

"I didn't and don't want to minimize what happened to you, but if you want to talk, I think I'll understand. I recognized some of those bruise patterns, I saw them often enough. There are only so many ways people can try and grab your arm and hold it behind your back after all."

It came out bittersweet from the boy, like a sour nostalgia. Gabrielle felt she understood. Even if magic let him make them go away, Harry would carry those scars until he crossed over to the other side. His shirt reappeared after a minute, and she offered him her hand. They spent a time sitting in companionable silence.

* * *

Eventually, they figured out they were inside one of their minds. As Harry figured it, it was either a mindscape of some kind, or they had an extremely powerful and bored cabal of wizards messing with them. The accepted theory was Harry's mind because it seemed to respond better to him, though Harry preferred his conspiracy ideas. They figured it out because while they had no empirical measure, time seemed to be wonky, day/night cycles could be a moment, or it could feel like a week. The two teens spent a long time getting to know one another, and attempting to figure out the bond they shared.

Something about it drove them to be in physical contact near constantly at east for the first few 'weeks' they spent in the mindscape. As near as they could figure it out, the ritual had been a kind of super powered unctuous unction designed to make the subject trust the caster implicitly in all things, and what's more obey them, likely as a part of some kind of preparation to eventually put Gabrielle into the black market Veela trade. The only thing they could come up with was that it worked both ways on each of them, their being relative strangers and talking intimately about how each had been abused for example. It had turned into some kind of sharing, each seemed to be able to borrow energy from one another in small amounts.

Gabrielle laughed when Harry said he was considering charging rent for his mind space. His wand was likely the bush Gabrielle identified as sweet wormwood, and his connection to Hedwig was definitely the fire, as it occasionally trilled happily at them as they whiled away time.

While they were in mindspace, they never seemed to get hungry, or to need to use the restroom. They were freed from temporal needs, and both found the experience confusing in the extreme. To combat their boredom they started expanding the island and making places to play. A massive jungle gym covered a square kilometer of island, Gabrielle created a replica of the house she lived in with her family, Harry did the same and they each gave the other tours.

Gabrielle talked a lot about her grandmother's village and what it was like to be part of a Veela clan. It was one of the most unique experiences she had, and Harry ate it up. The clan was very tight knit, marrying or dating a Veela resulted in an introduction to the clan and its matron, regardless of the Veela in question. So many people in the past preyed upon them as a group that the clan had a lot of protection built into it's culture. Over time their desirability turned them into a race of warriors to fend off unwanted advances. It was a somewhat awkward conversation, but Gabrielle used her memory to draw up some of the cave paintings that were the Veela races' primary historical treasures.

Her memory of the paintings was detailed, and Harry was awed by the depiction of winged women hunting, fighting, and defending themselves. Some of them were pornographic, which drove Harry to blush and Gabrielle to laugh. Veela were practically unknown in the UK, which was why Veela slavers went there. Its hard for a population to notice the capture of a specific kind of woman they have never seen before.

Harry told her about the family and his mum, Gabrielle talked about her sister, her parents, and her aunts and uncles in the clan. They talked about Hagrid, and his fascination with critters that would eat and disembowel anything smaller than him. Gabrielle told him about how much trouble her sister had with her allure at Beauxbatons. She confessed her worry over how her own allure would affect her when she came into it fully. Harry talked about Voldemort and how unprepared he felt. He showed her the memory he had of fighting him and expressed his concerns regarding an enemy that was less sane than a meth-riddled starving ferret on a hot tin roof.

Then they moved on to more fun topics. Harry showed her memories of flying, of Hedwig and her fire travel. Gabrielle showed him the joy of growing up with christmas. Her memories of birthdays growing up and holidays with her family.

They had a good time, but with all their construction and projections over time they both felt weakened. After they spent a few 'days' constructing the pyramids from Gabrielle's memories, they reached the conclusion that building things was draining magic from them in the real world, and probably why they had spent so much time in this place.

By mutual agreement, they took down everything they had built, and shrunk the island in the sky down to its original dimensions. As they let their collected energy build back up to non-coma levels, they traded books from their memories, and taught each other their respective languages. Gabrielle had picked up English quite easily from Harry's mind it seemed (she quietly suspected that their sharing was biased in his favor, servants needing to understand their master more than the reverse, but she didn't want him to feel guilty), but they were having a little trouble with Harry's French.

By the time Harry was getting near a fluent level in French, they could feel their magic stretching toward a critical threshold. They'd be waking up soon. The amount of time they had until they hit that point was arbitrary. If either felt like it they could probably extend their stay in Harry's mind for another few weeks, but having spent what felt like several months just hanging out in each other's company and getting to know one another, they were a little eager to get back to physical existence.

The working plan was to get Gabrielle back to her folks as soon as possible. She didn't have a strong grasp on time, especially after having spent a number of subjective weeks in Harry's mind, but she knew her parents were going beyond spare looking for her. The British having her would only make it worse, the mundanes weren't huge fans of one another, and with the French 'purebloods' having mostly been done away with during the revolution, the tensions were if anything higher between the countries.

It was something she and Harry had discussed in the mindspace. With everything that had happened to her, especially on British soil, it wasn't crazy that France would call for official censure in the ICW and get it. The Brits were self-absorbed enough, as a rule, for that to not mean a lot. Unfortunately the one man it would mean something to was Harry's headmaster and who already had an unhealthy interest in him. It would be a fun next few days.

They felt closer to wakefulness. The mindscape around them got hazier. They lay down between the bush and the fire, each closing their eyes and with a final squeeze of their hands, they both transitioned back.

* * *

The first thing Harry felt was the low pulse of the small hearts he had made so long ago. He didn't quite have a consistent pulse anymore, and he felt sure that blood pressure just didn't mean the same thing to him anymore. He rolled his neck, releasing a thunderous series of cracks into the room. Harry took the next moment of peace before the healers, his friends, and his folks came storming in to take stock of his limbs. Only then did he realize that he still had something in his hand. Looking to the side he saw Gabrielle, looking just as radiant as she had in the mindscape, her hand in his just as it had been when they left the mindscape. Her dark blue eyes, two round sapphires glinting with mischief and amusement, met his for a moment. She squeezed his hand as the door to their room opened admitting an army of concerned healers and well-wishers.


	16. Complications and Stuff

[A/N]: Most of the french I use is my best guess from cross-checking between different translation sites, and in all honesty I straight don't have the patience to keep doing that for dialogue. In this chapter if it's in italics and not clearly an incantation or not clearly marked as a thought, that means it's in French. Points if you get the reference I used in Jean-Pierre's cursing.

* * *

Chapter Fifteen: Complications and Stuff

* * *

The St. Mungos DMLE ward was in chaos. It lay on the lowest level of the hospital in the farthest back corner of the building. Space expansion rune arrays and charms ensured that there was never a shortage of beds, but the ward itself was designed to be small, secure, and impossible to access without official notice. It was a design choice that was perfect for taking care of injured convicts or ensuring the safety of witnesses. It was, however, not designed for crowds of well-wishers or parents attempting to get to the side of their recently kidnapped offspring. To it, and its designer's, credit it was an excellent ward most of the time, some things were just difficult to compensate for.

Harry and Gabrielle woke together in an observation room. Within seconds of their regaining consciousness, healers were swarming the pair, wands firing off diagnostic spells like they were going out of style. The room had been tracking their progress towards recharging their cores for the last six days. There had been a noticeable jump in the last twenty four hours in the rate at which they were regaining energy, so most of the senior staff looking over their case as well as Harrys family and Gabrielle's investigator were all ready for them to rejoin the world of the living.

Being a metamorph, Harry was always acutely aware of his body and how he was doing. He and Nym hadn't gotten sick in over a year because of how close to their biological processes they had become. Having spent the last... Harry had to pause for a moment as he considered how much time exactly had passed. They experienced at least two months inside his head. Maybe more? Keeping calendars hadn't been a priority. How much time had passed on the outside? At any rate, having spent the last arbitrary chunk of time stuck in his own head, he was even more in tune with the center of his being than normal.

With his hand still closed gently around Gabrielle's, and a set of four healers all asking him questions and scanning the daylights out of him, Harry closed his eyes and sunk his awareness into the physicality of his being. Where before he had been purely in his mind, completely disconnected from his physical form, he now immersed himself in the feelings of his body. It was glorious; he had underestimated how much he missed his body.

The rhythm of his hearts (was that what he was going to go with? Hearts? What do you call distributed blood pumps? Harry couldn't help but think that nomenclature blows) was slightly off, a few of the pumps in his lower body were slightly out of sync with the rest, so he lined all of the timing back up. His body had taken the nutrient potions and the skele-grow and used them to regenerate the ribs that had been injured as well as the part of his lung. The hearts he had set up had become easily half again as large and powerful as he had made them in his moment of emergency. Harry silently thanked the gods for non-specific regeneration potions.

The fucker (guy, man, or person, Harry amended internally. Susan and Hermione both would be after him for his language, regardless of his terrible disfiguring injuries) who had got him had been lying down and in front of Harry at the time, so the blast caught him heading up and at an angle. It destroyed his heart, passed through the upper part of his left lung, and exited through his shoulder blade. The potions had repaired almost all the damage, but Harry could feel something very curious in his internal structure now. His magic had evidently decided that having a single large heart in the middle of his chest was just a liability, so it hadn't guided any of the potions into replacing the destroyed organ. He now had a space in him that was just sort of... empty. It was weird. Other than that though, he was in pretty good shape all things considered. He thanked his lucky stars that the blast hadn't caught him in the spine. That would have been difficult verging on impossible to recover from.

Maybe that would be his next project with Nym? Transfiguring pieces of themselves into inanimate things, like his literal brass knuckle trick, was interesting and had been their project well into the summer. Now that he was thinking about taking damage on the scale he had, working on a redundant nervous system would also be a really good goal for the pair. The new project would actually not be too far away from what they had been doing. Transfiguring the animate flesh of their bodies selectively into the inanimate was actually simple, but painful. Animate to animate, human to animal, human to super-human, these didn't destroy nerves, they changed the form of them but they didn't make them end suddenly or disappear. Duplicating, deadening, or otherwise manipulating the nerves was the majority of the issue after the power intensive but straight forward task of transfiguring the flesh to metal or any other inanimate material.

Harry lost himself in his musings and the sensations of having a body again. His ideas about the routing of bones and nerves in the damaged area carrying him well through the scans of the healers present. He was brought back to reality immediately though as a small piece of him in the back of his mind screamed in frustration. Harry squeezed Gabrielle's hand again. Now that they were back out into the meat space (what else could you call the opposite of mind space?) it seemed like he had an open connection to her like he did with his phoenix, who knew he and Gabrielle were fine the whole time and was currently out in the lobby with his mildly panicking mum.

While he had been being scanned she had a single healer, a translator, and an investigative auror questioning her, likely because he had been admitted with a missing organ and she with bruises and cuts. From their time together in his head, Gabrielle could speak English just as well as Harry could. The auror and translator were being less than sensitive in their tone and questions though. They hadn't recognized her name, despite her father's status, and the auror seemed to be actively insinuating that the whole scenario was her fault somehow.

The man in question, Investigator John Dawlish, was a textbook example of British pureblood ideology. He had all the grace and tact of a man of 'superior breeding', but none of the noblesse oblige that allowed such a class to live past any kind of significant cultural renaissance. It was a sad fact of British wizarding society that his attitude was considered mild enough to be assigned to be the investigator in a case of abduction and abuse. Harry's patience didn't last long.

"Let's get this straight, Ms. Delacour, you were walking along the French Diagon Alley-"

"Rue de la Sorcellerie," Gabrielle interjected.

"Right, whatever, and you went to a public restroom where you got yourself caught and portkeyed out. Then you managed to get yourself sent over to our shores, eh?"

"I had no choice in it auror, they had me under la potion de mort vivant. I woke in a cell I did not even know I was on your shores.."

"Of course, Ms. Delacour," all of Dawlish's words were right, but his tone didn't quite agree with the message, the corner of Harry's mind dedicated to Gabrielle was lighting up like a Christmas tree. He had enough.

"Excuse me, Dawlish, right?"

"Yes, Mr. Potter?"

"That's Bones, Auror Dawlish, and please bring in my mother. You probably don't realize it, but interviewing Ms. Delacour is above your pay grade. You should immediately alert Minister Fudge."

"I know of no Ancient and Noble House of Delacour," Dawlish began, before Harry Interrupted again.

"That's because no one has done their research in your department, you knew she was French, did you look into French families or politics? The Minister of Magic for France is one Jean-Pierre Delacour, her father. Unless you want to be at the head of an international incident, I suggest you act like less of a git and find someone more important."

Harry and Gabrielle both agreed privately that it was a good thing she wasn't through puberty and so didn't have an allure yet. Her being Veela was hard to miss, their avian natures came out early in their bone structure and their appearances were well remarked upon even in their younger years. It would make the normally unpleasant British 'nobility' even worse to deal with.

Dawlish looked incredibly offended, but with only some minor dithering left to find Amelia, taking the rather useless translator with him. Something told Harry that would come back to bite him, but he just woke up from what the whispers of the healers told him was a weeklong magic coma. He figured his patience had earned its current stressed state.

* * *

In the next half hour a series of international floo calls were made, culminating in Jean-Pierre and Apolline Delacour taking a hastily made international portkey straight to the special hole in St. Mungo's wards for the DMLE's use.

The concerned parents bull-rushed through each layer of security, leaving a half dozen orderlies and aurors stunned (thankfully in an emotional/figurative rather than the more normal magical sense) before finding their daughter's room. Two burly aurors stood out front of the door, each looking less than friendly and even more than less than inclined to move. Jean-Pierre flashed his credentials, which were examined minutely. After it took more than fifteen seconds for the men to assure themselves of his identity, he gave his wife a look. Their youngest was in trouble, this was an primal thing they were doing.

The reason he had fallen in love with and married Appoline hadn't been for her looks (though they hadn't hurt), or even for the mass of brains behind her stunningly beautiful face (neither of which came close to spoiling the affair), no. Jean-Pierre had wooed her for her unique kind of ruthlessness in the pursuit of her family's and her own self-interest. It was something which could not have been sexier to a consummate politician like Jean-Pierre, and it showed itself in situations like this.

Apolline cranked her aura up, well past normal background levels. In a trice the men were an open jaw away from actively drooling, Jean-Pierre plucked his credentials from the numb fingers of the former bars to their passage and the couple made their way into their daughter's room.

As they entered, both took in the scene before them. Gabrielle lay propped up in bed next to one of the most recognizable faces in the magical world, word and discrete photos of Harry having made their ways into the hands of journalists the world over, each looking for a scoop on the boy who had brought an end to the dark lord nearly responsible for another world war. The boy in question was conversing with the head of the British department of magical law enforcement (one of the few magical officials respected outside the UK) and had an arm around their child.

Their entrance had not gone unmarked, and there was a beat of stillness as the two parents saw their daughter for the first time in the two and a half week period during which she had been kidnapped. There was a lot of emotion in their expressions; neither held any uncertainty over the fate that would have befallen their daughter should she have not been found. Veela were sought after, as a rule, by the shadier elements of the wizarding world for their sexual prowess. There was a reason that nearly the entire world's population of the demi-humans lived in warded colonies inside countries with specially protective laws. Seeing their daughter under the arm of a wizard she literally could not have known for longer than two weeks at the outside led them to one mostly correct and completely devastating conclusion.

Under his breath Jean-Pierre whispered, "Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'enculé de ta mère."

Apolline seemed to almost aparate to her daughter's side, and carefully avoiding disrupting the physical connection between Gabrielle and Harry, pressed her head to her daughters.

" _Gabrielle! Daughter! We were so worried we didn't know what to do, they snatched you and the aurors couldn't get traces from the apparition and for the last week the fuc... the British have been making strange inquiries about missing people and we thought one of their basta... senior officials had you and we were so worried!"_

Gabrielle gave Harry's leg a squeeze from where her hand had rested on it, and as he withdrew his arm from around her she threw herself at her mother. She knew exactly how worried they would have been. Apolline cared about little else, and even though Jean-Pierre spent the majority of his time wheeling and dealing in the upper echelons of French society, in the end he too was nothing more than a father putting on airs of being a politician. He confessed to his daughters more than once that the only reason he had gotten into the game to begin with was that he couldn't trust the future of his family's country to anyone else.

" _Mama! By the goddess you have no idea how much I missed you and Papa and Fleur! I just went to use the bathroom, and they came out of nowhere, they used the potion of the living death on me, I woke up in a cell in a warehouse, and they tried to hurt me but I fought them. I was rescued by Harry and a bunch of British aurors, and Harry got really hurt trying to rescue me and we got linked because he bled all over the ritual they were trying to use on me."_

Jean-Pierre had come to his wife and daughter's side by then, Harry and Amelia both looking on the family moment with a mix of embarrassment and amazement, Harry because he was in the meatspace listening to a full conversation in French and he actually understood it, Amelia because she actually recognized the man and woman who had come in as one of the most powerful and influential couples in France and the ICW at large.

" _Gabrielle_ ," Jean-Pierre said, " _You have no idea how good it is to see you healthy. We love you so much, we were so worried, your sister has not slept a wink since you have been gone. We nearly had to stun her to be able to come here to get you. We were worried about these roast beefs trying to keep us from you, and we were so worried they might have bound you in some way!"_

The sudden guilty expressions shared by the eleven and newly twelve year olds were somehow not a source of comfort to any of the parents in the room.

" _Papa, maman, I... we... well we need to talk. Please-_ let us switch over to English, I do not know if Ms. Bones is fluent in French."

The aforementioned Bones interjected, "I told you Gabrielle, please call me Amelia. I can speak French with some fluency so don't worry too much about me. I do think we should keep it to English though so we don't lose Harry," she said, idly ruffling her son's hair.

Harry threw in the beginning of the bad news (well he and Gabrielle had spent days talking about it as they got to know each other and in reflection didn't think it to be too bad) news, "Funny you should say that. I'm kinda fluent in French now too. It's been a sort of side effect of what happened to Gabrielle and I. Apolline, Jean-Pierre, did you only just find out or have you heard how we got here?"

The vastly more worried parents (Amelia having been somewhat inured to this kind of thing from long exposure) shared a short look, some message passing without words between them. They turned back to Harry and with a gentle shake of the head done in stereo; Harry sighed and took Gabrielle and his mum's hands for comfort.

"Please sit down, it's a bit of a tale."

* * *

The mistaken identity, the attack on Gabrielle's captors, the ritual gone awry, the attack on Harry, an indeterminate time of mental projection. The kids told it all. Harry went through the details and Gabrielle kept him moving on through the bigger picture.

Their place in the observations room of the DMLE wing was thankfully unneeded for any greater task, so they spent most of the rest of the day on their story. Gabrielle filled in details from her time as a captive. The group delicately danced around the idea of what kind of horrors could have happened had the group that had taken her not thought her more valuable 'untainted'.

The hardest part of the story was trying to define or share what they understood of their relationship now. Since they were back out in the meatspace they could fully realize just how they were tied together. They shared their thoughts on the ritual, and Amelia shared that the British unspeakables were still pulling apart at an arithmantic level. The head unspeakable had evidently sought out Amelia to tell her that it was likely they would never tear down what happened to a level that would give them any kind of definite answer. The factors involved were simply too complex to lend themselves to solvable arithmantic expressions. The kids now trusted each other, they shared a connection at a magical level where each could borrow power from the other, they shared a connection at the mental level with each describing a similar feeling of the other in their minds, and they felt a compulsion (in the magical sense) to maintain a physical connection for now as well. Practically the only good news they had for Gabrielle's worried parents was that in their mental experience they should be able to be separated physically without pain or trouble in two weeks or so.

The time frame thankfully allowed each to separate in enough time to attend their respective schools, with the French school Beauxbatons also being a boarding school.

The trouble in their conversation was what to do moving forward. Gabrielle was Veela, Harry a metamorph. Each of their natures removed a significant amount of the 'boys/girls are gross, throw rocks at them!' feelings that most their ages would have felt. Being so removed from that awkwardness meant that they could have a conversation (or series thereof) back in the mindspace about where they were going, and they didn't want to lose one another. Whether or not it was due to the ritual, they had grown really close.

It took a terrifying moment for both of them. Harry relinquished his mum's hand; Gabrielle drew her knees to herself and leaned into Harry who put an arm around her. They didn't want to have to say goodbye to each other forever. Gabrielle wanted to see if she could attend Hogwarts, British educational standards being officially (which is to say as far as they knew) only slightly behind French on the international stage. Harry's recreation of the castle had sung to both of them, and Gabrielle wanted someone in her life who would not grow to resent her when she inevitably went through puberty and discovered the Veela inside her.

It was a striking image to the parents. Harry with a protective arm around her, her leaning into him. She had a vulnerable air around her that Harry instinctively recognized from the moment he saw her in the warehouse, and without thinking about how it would look to either of their parents he had tried to give her what comfort he could.

It would take work for all of them, but between Amelia and the Delacours, they worked out a way to get it together over a few hours. Both kids would need to spend the next year at their separate schools, it was too late to change that, but for the pair's third years, they would both be at Hogwarts.

The biggest concern the Delacours had was whether or not their daughter would be safe, but all it took to address that concern was to reveal his heritage. Hogwarts herself already kept an eye on her students, and Harry felt sure the family in particular. If she attended, Gabrielle would be extended the same slightly preferential status that being associated with a direct heir to the founders conferred. Aside from which, the castle definitely owed him for his work at the semester's end. Their fears were mollified, news of a Troll in Hogwarts having spread internationally, and news of Voldemort having spread to them personally from their new friends.

* * *

Their day at the hospital was well spent. As they left Amelia smoothed the ruffled feathers of the guards to the DMLE wing. Many had reported angrily to her as Apolline's aura wore off, none had found sympathy however. As it turned out, stalling a head of state in their quest to see their kidnapped child was not really something she had patience for.

The Delacours extracted a promise from their daughter, Harry, Amelia, and several nearby orderlies that they would not leave the safety of the hospital, and then took their portkey back to France and Chateau Delacour. A few minutes later they reappeared with a taller, significantly more buxom, and very tearful version of Harry's new friend.

" _GABRIELLE! GoddessaboveIwassoworriedandyouweren'tthereandnooneknew!"_ The older girl had tears streaming from her eyes as she wrapped Gabrielle in a massive hug. Harry knew well how much Fleur loved and relied on her sister. The males (and a number of ladies) flocked to Fleur at school. It was impossible for her to be taken seriously in any context because of the number of literally drooling men around her at any given point. Her 'friends' were after her body, her enemies were too. Anything good she did was because of her allure; anything bad was because she was a 'bimbo'. Gabrielle kept her grounded, and Fleur was hit very hard by her kidnapping.

Fleur was a sobbing mess draped around her sister, who was focused entirely on comforting her sister. Harry could feel the warmth of Gabrielle's love for her sister emanating from the piece of mental real estate her shared with the small Veela. It took a while, but Fleur got control of herself, and for the rest of the day the three were inseparable.

The group as a whole headed to the Ossuary. In rapid French Gabrielle explained to Fleur how she had to stay in contact with Harry. If they lost connection for more than a minute they felt compelled to get back and if they held out for too much longer the place in each of their mind spaces that connected them began to pulse with mild pain. Thus far they hadn't gone more than five minutes, and neither had any desire to test it.

* * *

Harry left the floo portal in the main receiving hall of the Ossuary with his customary grace. Which is a classy way of saying that he exited the jade fire of the floo at around five miles an hour faster than he had entered and arse first. The inside of the public areas of the Ossuary were all done in a highly polished cream colored stone. The Bones who had commissioned the manor had really been into the bone theme. Harry slid four full meters on the highly polished floor, coming to rest sitting at Susan's feet.

"Hahahahahaha, oh bollocks, I hate the floo. Hey Suse!" Harry said dumbly from his ignoble position.

Susan leaned forward and wrapped her brother in a tight hug, "We have been so worried you big dumb oaf. How do you get into this stuff! We were gonna have a party and it was your stupid birthday."

She was an inch from tears, a hurried glance to his sides showed all his girls in the same state. Harry got to his feet and the hug with his sister turned into a group hug as Hannah and Nym joined in. Andi stood behind them, Harry had woken up on her day off, and she had been watching the kids.

The family (sans the god-brother, who hadn't yet heard that Harry was back up) assured themselves that Harry was in fact whole, and behind them the Delacours and Amelia flooed in. Harry left his tearful hugs with his family to stand at Gabrielle's side, taking her hand to relieve the tension in the back of his mind. The entire family looked askance on the two pre-teens and the still incredibly upset Veela that followed them. In short order Harry and Gabrielle told their tale for the second time that day.

* * *

As of the day Harry woke, twenty-four days remained in the summer. They each passed too quickly as the family and their new addition made good use of each of them. Harry, Hannah, Susan, and Nym showed Gabrielle and Neville around the Ossuary and Abbot grounds. They all had a fine time, but on reflection Nym seemed… snippy.

It was in many ways a girl thing, in as far as Harry and Neville were clueless of it at least. Susan and Hannah chose not to involve themselves, but Gabrielle and Nym were definitely in a state of cold war. The family would fly around the grounds and Nym's movements would become increasingly reckless in an attempt to impress Harry, something which was hard to do on a training broom. Gabrielle was careful to do small things like make eye contact with Nym during her magically enforced cuddle time with the oblivious boy.

Nym thought she had staked out a claim on Harry. They had adventured enough around Hogwarts and the family's grounds, she was the one who was always with him. Gabrielle had just spent a somewhat arbitrary amount of time inside Harry's head alone with the boy. Susan and Hannah could only sit back and reflect on how it would end badly if they couldn't make peace.

The collected family threw another party, no surprise and Harry never anyone's line of sight this time, for Harry, Neville and Hannah. Harry and Neville had nearly identical birthdays and Hannah's was July 16th. Harry had the chance to thank everyone who had lent time to the effort to figure out what had happened to him, particularly to Ragnok and Griffy, both of whom he deeply appreciated. He wasn't even of the same species as them, and despite his friendship with the pair it made their help more meaningful to him for them to have assisted. It wasn't exactly a nice world out there.

At their party on the 16th Hagrid came and hand delivered the family's letters. It was normally a birthday thing, but Harry having missed his, Nym's being during the year, and Hannah's being that day, it had seemed an opportune time. The kids and the adults all agreed to have their trip to Diagon on the 23rd, as it would be the Delacour's last day in jolly old England.

The trip was unremarkable, aside from the stacks of Lockhart books each of them had to buy. Word around the alley spoke of an embarrassing encounter near Harry and Neville's birthday where Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley fought 'like common muggles'. The shopkeepers along the alley gossiped like proverbial old women, to the everyone's continued amusement. Gabrielle was entering her first year, the family was mostly entering their second.

The Delacours caught an international portkey out of the alley at the end of the family's shopping day. For the first time, but nowhere near the last, Gabrielle needed her sister's support instead of the other way around. She was in silent tears by the time her family departed for the continent, Fleur's hug the only thing keeping her together.

As a long silver chain whisked his newest friend into a pocket dimension and away, Harry folded his arms around himself. He didn't speak again that day outside of answers to direct questions, and when the family finished up with refreshing their potions reagents, he went directly to his room alone. He needed to think it out, he decided. Harry skipped dinner that night.

No one said anything about his absence the next day. They just stayed a little closer than normal. He appreciated it.

It was another quiet week before the first, and the family's return to Hogwarts.


	17. Second Year Cometh!

Chapter Sixteen: Second Year Cometh!

* * *

The Hogwarts express was an interesting piece of wizarding Britain. It represented one of the English Ministry's only forays into sanctioned magical-muggle technological interface, the only other of note being the Wizarding Wireless Network.

The Express and platform Nine and Three-Quarters was conceived of decades before by Hogwarts Board of Trustees. In a better time they had sought to include something to make the firstborn more comfortable and to bring the wizards from ancient wizarding linages into the more modern age. It was brilliantly conceived, the enchanting work done by some of the foremost minds of the age. The mundane avoidance and confusion wards were among the most advanced constructed even to the modern day. The train and the line was constructed based on plans 'borrowed' from the Stockton and Darlington Railway company in the early 1800s.

The engine was enchanted for constant steam pressure, for indestructibility, and for speed. The rails were encrusted with runes keeping them from rusting or breaking and ensuring nearly no speed loss to friction. The luggage and passenger cars, however, were the most impressive piece of magic on the train. The Express was built during the early stages of a population boom in British wizarding society, so in a rare look forward for the community, the train was enchanted to spawn new cars and new compartments to match the needs of the people riding it. It was all made possible through the incredible inclusion of near-sentient space expansion charms.

Needless to say, the creators of the whole system were _very_ impressed with themselves, and so it was set that there was no magical way directly into the station. All portkeys, floo travelers, apparations, broom, carpets, and enchanted sets of flying capes and pants were all redirected to a safe area just outside the entrance to the platform.

The Family all met up at the Ossuary (that being the location of greatest small people population) to head over to King's Cross. Neville had spent the night, along with Hannah, which rounded out the group. Nym and her mum being more or less permanent fixtures at this stage. From there it was a short set of side along aparations, and the whole crew was together at the Kings Cross Aparation Station, a bored auror directing them to move along so others could come in behind them.

Despite the best efforts of the Bones elves, the family was running behind that day so it was 10:45 am that everyone was gathered together out in front of the platform change. Harry moved first towards the false wall, taking his time with an easy stroll. The key to not being noticed was acting like whatever you were doing was how the thing should be done. As Amelia frequently told the kids, confidence was key.

It was with great surprise then that Harry, shrunken trunk in pocket and phoenix companion out hunting, walked forehead first into a solid wall.

In an amazing moment for the adults taking up the rear, Harry cried "Bugger!" before backing up a step straight into Nym. Nym made chest to back contact with a reeling Harry, and was knocked directly backward into Neville. Neville, who had been talking intently to Hannah and was therefore looking to his side instead of forward, was hit directly in the chest by the upper body of a flailing metamorph who managed to take out not only him, but the lady his attention was on. In the space of a moment three kids were on the ground groaning, Harry was leaning against a wall clutching his head, and Susan, Amelia, Andi, and the Dowager Longbottom were all doing their own best to not fall over of laughter.

The kids picked themselves up, glaring as one at the boy clutching his head, and the family moved to the side as Amelia and Andi moved forward to figure out why the gateway was closed.

Amelia put her hand to the barrier, and it passed through. Out of curiosity, Nym tried the same experiment, and replicated Amelia's results. One by one, the kids went through the barrier without any trouble, except Harry. Whenever he went to go through, the barrier solidified immediately.

Knowing how late they were, Andi and the esteemed Dowager took the family through to the train, and Amelia took Harry around the pillar the barrier to Nine and Three-Quarters passed through to wait andnot old up traffic.

"Harry, the train's probably going to leave before we can figure out why it's hardening just for you. Give me five minutes to run through and get them to wait a moment for you so we can work it out. I'll be right back, but wait for me here, got it kiddo?"

Giving his assent, Amelia joined the other parents, and Harry began a solid loiter next to the gate. He put his hand in his pockets and began glaring as passers-by, the whole deal, it was one of the contexts in which he was a traditionalists, he only wished he had a cigarette. About two minutes after she disappeared, Harry heard a large family passing through the barrier and two disheveled house elves popped right in front of him. Their sudden appearance causing him to jump and make brief contact with the barrier pillar again.

"Harry! I's being Benny. Griffy has set me to watch over you since yous been bounded to the Gabby. I just caught this one," the small elf shook the other, marginally more disheveled, elf he was holding by the arm, "makings the barrier be solids for you."

The other elf immediately spoke up, "I's said I was sorry! I didn't hear that Harry is being one of us, I would have just talked to him if I knows that! Harry, my name is being Dobby. I's with Malfoy family. I just wanted you to know, Malfoy family is being planning something bad to happen at Hogwarts this year! I's can't say what, family things, but I wanteds to warn you and stop yous from going back. I didn't know yous were one of us, else I wouldn't have interfered with you. I's sorry!"

Harry leaned his back against the pillar and sunk to his knees so he was level with the two elves, "Thank you for looking out for me Benny, I owe you and I owe Griffy. You all just let me know what I can do, yeah?" Benny nodded his thanks, a smile wide on his small face, "And Dobby, don't worry too much, I don't hold it against you. I understand that I look human and act human, I can't fault you for not knowing I'm also a brother elf. Thanks for letting me know there's going to be danger. You let me know what I can do to help you too, okay?"

Benny let go of Dobby, and the two elves nodded their assent. Harry shook dobby's tiny hand, and gave Benny a quick hug (He was pretty attached to the Hogwarts elves), "Can I go through now? I promise you Dobby that I will be careful, and now you know that Griffy and the Hogwarts guys have my back."

Dobby snapped his fingers with a smile, and then popped away, Benny soon doing the same. Harry sat back for a moment with a smile. It was something he loved about elves, and something he felt made him just a bit more like them. They were very agreeable folks. They all just wanted to do the best they could, and in the face of new information, they absorbed, adapted, and moved on. Harry loved them, and he couldn't be more proud to be accepted by them.

Standing, he swiftly moved through the barrier and found his mum in a quiet but demonstrative conversation with the engineer of the train. He pulled at her sleeve to get her attention.

"It's okay mum, I worked it out, I made it through."

The engineer looked at him for a moment, and muttering under his breath moved off back to the gleaming engine. Amelia turned fully to him, "How did you get through, I ran a diagnostic or two from this side and I couldn't identify anything keeping it solid for you. It had to have been something keyed to your signature, but there wasn't anything on the gate beside its normal avoidance and confusion wards."

Harry looked a little abashed for a moment, "Its elf business mum. I can't say. But it shouldn't ever be a problem again."

Amelia looked up and opened her mouth to say something, but after a moment shut it with a confused look on her face. She looked back at her son and opened it again to say something else, and thought better of it. It was just Harry-madness she decided. That way lay a deep and wide rabbit hole. If she recalled correctly it ended out okay overall for Alice, but honestly she wasn't sure she had the same constitution for strange that girl did. Amelia decided to just leave it.

"Just hurry along and get on the train. Susan, Nym and the rest should all be in the first couple cars," She leaned down and hugged her son, squeezing him tightly, "I love you kiddo. Please keep safe. Please, please, please. Try to not kill your defense professor again, stay away from trolls, and for the love of god kid, if a bunch of aurors pull you aside to join an operation, talk to me first, yeah?"

Harry returned the hug with fervor, "I'll do my best mum. You know I will."

Amelia stood and looked at her boy, "I was really afraid you'd say that. Now scoot!"

Harry snapped off a salute, she returned it, and he made his way onto the train to track down Nym and the rest. A few moments later a classically dressed conductor stepped from the engine. He removed a pocket watch from his coat, wound it, and looked to the station clock before shouting, "All aboard!" A few blasts of the steam whistle later, the Hogwarts express started its yearly journey for the Scottish Highlands.

* * *

As the train began moving, Harry started making his way through the first few cars. The compartments of the first were reserved for the prefects and head boy and girls as usual. The second car was where he expected to find his friends, but after checking all the compartments he couldn't find them. The third car was a bust as well, but halfway down the fourth he found them filling a compartment.

Nym noticed him first, "Hey! We were hoping you'd keep going down! All the places were full, we were lucky to find room here," Harry swept his gaze through their compartment, noting the one person he didn't already know as Nym continued, "Neville noticed that this place didn't seem full, and our new friend Luna here offered to let us all join her."

The aforementioned Luna looked up at hearing her name and saw the new arrival, "Aha! Harry Bones! Bloody finally! I came here because I heard from the dabberblimps that you'd be here," her expression had started out bright and eager, but as she continued her face took on an incredibly confuse cast, "They were also telling me that you did a lot of work with mud and ceramics. I don't see how though, unless..."

As Luna trailed off she stood, her bright yellow sundress and her dirty blonde hair swaying in the gentle breeze from the open window, and took Harry's right hand checking carefully under his nails and sniffing at each of his fingers. After a moment of confusion on Harry's part and suppressed amusement on everyone else's, she sat back down looking as confused as Harry did, "No, I don't see or smell any kind of clay. I don't see how you could possibly be a potter. Hmph. Damn 'blimps, bunch of plonkers, always lying to me."

In a manner Harry could only call adorable and at complete odds to the fact that she spoke like a dock worker, she crossed arms and scrunched into herself as she harrumphed. He giggled.

"You'd be surprised, Luna. I would like to think that I'm a very decent potter, in fact I was even born a Potter. Thank fully I was later rescued by my bones. Also I would like to think that I clean up well."

The family caught his joke, and Luna brightened to the bubbly girl he had seen when he entered, "Good," she said, "I like those bastard 'blimps, they glow at night when they keep me company. And they taught me all the best curse words!"

Harry took a seat, "Yeah, I was going to ask, why are you swearing so much? Not that I mind, I love cursing, mind you."

Nym cleared her throat, looking at Harry intently, and he immediately amended, "I'm sorry, I _fucking_ love _bloody_ cursing."

He turned to her and got the nod he was looking for.

Luna looked at the byplay curiously, "Well I wanted to be a sailor when I was smaller, and my Daddy told me that if I wanted to be something I should bloody well try my best. I read some books about them and met a few and I thought that if that bunch of twats cursed, I should too!"

Susan and Hannah were in stitches, Neville was red in the face from suppressed laughter, and Nym's hair was rapidly changing colors as she faced her own laughter related issues. Harry wore a wide grin as he spoke to their new friend, "That is a really admirable goal, but maybe you should try and tone it down a little. I think our friend Hermione is going to throw a fit when she meets you, and if you keep cursing you might be in a little trouble in your classes."

Luna accepted that logic, though she did complain about the professors at Hogwarts being 'a bunch of bloody toffs'.

"Luna, you wouldn't happen to be Luna Lovegood, would you? Daughter of the Xenophilius Lovegood that runs The Quibbler? Cousin to Lysergis Lovegood of the Burning Man shaman?" Harry asked with a curious glint in his eye.

Luna giggled for a moment and looked off into the distance, "Cousin Lysergis! I haven't seen that cheeky bastard since my eye-opening. He is a good man, wise too. He trained with some of the last Nahuatl shaman," She refocused and looked at Harry, "Yes, I am that Luna," suddenly she looked confused, "But really I'm this Luna. Can that Luna be the same as this Luna? How would that work," she paused for a beat, the family looking entirely confused and amused around her, "Nope, wait, that Luna is definitely this Luna, so really we're all the same," she finished with a satisfied smile, having resolved her momentary identity crisis.

Harry, in a surprising feat of mental gymnastics, followed the whole line of thought, "I agree. And your cousin is actually a hero of mine. I've read a bit of the Burning Man shaman's works. But anyway, do you think you can put me into contact with a bodyguard your father employed? A guy by the name Remus Lupin?"

Harry honestly didn't think it was possible, but Luna's mood appeared to brighten further, "Oooh, sure! I liked that bugger! Even if he seems like he was exposed to Luple weed when he was young," the family's faces must have shown their curiosity or confusion as she continued, "luple weed mimics the effects of lycanthropy, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't a werewolf because I kept leaving rabbits all around him and he never ate even one."

As a group they decided to leave that one alone.

Luna turned out to be a lot of fun. They had been bandying the phrase new friend about casually in reference to her, but as the train ride went on they began to actually mean it. She had interesting theories on a number of magical creatures that none of the family had ever heard of, and she was generally bubbly and cute, despite her… unusual word choices.

Before long Hermione also showed up in the compartment. Her parents were still uncomfortable with magic and the magical world, so they had not allowed her to spend much time with the family over the summer. Hermione swore they were getting a bit better though and she expected to be able to visit and perhaps spend some time with the friends the next summer.

Hermione unfortunately was also immediately at odds with Luna. None of the creatures Luna talked about speaking to or seeing were in any of the books that Hermione had read, so she took issue with her claims. The prolific swearing didn't help much.

The biggest event of the trip was another appearance by Draco Malfoy.

Shortly after the trolley lady came by and plied her wares, the silver haired boy showed up flanked by his constant companions, Crabbe and Goyle. This year the friends didn't lock their compartment, so he simply threw open the doors and waltzed in.

"They say Harry Potter is in this compartment, and... Ah yes," he said, spotting Harry, "Well Potter, you've been quiet at school before now, but I've decided that this year I'm going to do you a favor. You will have the privilege of being my good friend, you'll no longer have to hang around this riff-raff, and you'll get to know the people around Hogwarts who are truly only of the best breeding." He finished with an imperious smile, and turned on his heel, walking out into the hall again.

The friend all looked at one another, trying to figure out if what just happened had, in fact, actually just happened. After a few moments and when Harry didn't move from his seat next to Nym and Luna, Draco stepped back into the compartment.

"Well? Come along, Potter, we don't have all day!"

Harry looked to the boy, "Oh I'm sorry, did you mean me? The name is Bones, friend, and honestly I'm doing just fine here. Thanks for the offer though I suppose. If you'd close the door on your way back out that would be nice."

Draco's face clouded with rage, "Now see here, Potter. You have a chance to become a friend and ally of one of House Malfoy!"

Harry leaned back into his seat, and placed his arms around the two girls next to him, giving both a half-hug, "Honestly mate, I'm doing perfectly well where I am. You go have fun though."

"Well Potter, seems like you may just go the same way as your parents. My father wi-"

Harry quick as a flash stood and morphed his face into a likeness of Draco's before countering, "Not before my father hears of this! Didn't I tell you last year, disgrace to our house, wearing ugly robes like that and associating with people of half troll stock!"

He started advancing towards the doors to the compartment, driving Draco out step by step, "Why if my father were here right now he would whip you for talking down to your betters and behaving in such an undignified manner, you bring shame to the house and-"

Harry slammed the doors together in the Slytherin's face and cast a fast locking charm on the door, followed by a silencing charm. He turned and replaced his wand in its holster with a flourish, "That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you drive off a snake without resorting to St. Patrick's staff, or a bit of the old ultra-violence."

Hermione scoffed for a moment with a teasing smile on her face, "Ultra-violence, I knew giving you those old sci-fi books was going to end up a bad idea."

Harry countered as he sat, "Ha! You're just afraid that this little face-dancer will end up being the kwisatz-haderach!"

As the rest of the family looked on again in apparent confusion, Luna cast her face in a sagely manner and intoned, "Muad'dib brings honor to us all."

* * *

Unbeknownst to the family and its friends, Harry had accidentally warded off a second visitor earlier that day. Draco Malfoy had been given a directive from his father to make a connection with the boy-who-lived, and Ron Weasley had been discretely given the same mission by his mother. Ron met with difficulties entering the station however.

In the minutes after the family discovered that Harry could not enter the station, and before he had been taken aside by a pair of house elves, the clan Weasley entered the station along with the Twin's friend Lee Jordan and Ron's friends Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan. The Weasley matriarch and patriarch had both entered the station first with their youngest to ensure she made it on the train without any trouble. The brothers then entered, with Ron and his friends being pushed to the end of the line by Fred and George.

Just as they were about to pass the barrier into the station, Harry rested his back against the pillar that held the barrier as he spoke quietly to an elf named Dobby. While he and Dobby spoke, Ron, Dean and Seamus all crashed into the barrier and scattered their things in front of it. As Harry continued speaking they all jumped up and pounded on the still solid barrier, each desperate to get in as they were already running late.

While Harry finished his conversation, they quickly re-packed their things. As he headed through the barrier to find his mum, they were racing out of the station to a certain enchanted car. As Harry found his friends, they were being spotted by mundanes across Britain in a flying Ford Anglia.

Theirs would be an interesting entrance to the school year.

* * *

As the Hogwarts express pulled into the Hogsmeade station, the friends all changed into their robes and made themselves ready for their year to begin. As the train finally came to a stop outside the small country-style station they all filed out of the compartment, and further out of the train.

Hagrid, the lovable half-giant protectorate of House Gryffindor, held his massive oak wand aloft, a _lumos_ providing the light that for years he had used a large lantern for.

"Firs' years this way! Firs' years over here!" He called into the crowds of students.

Luna began to point her steps away from the friends she had made and towards the rest of the new students when Harry took her aside for a moment, "Luna, tradition forbids me from saying how you get sorted, but I just wanted to make sure you know one thing before it happens. It doesn't matter where you end up, you have a place with me and the rest, okay?"

Harry had gotten some vibes from her during the trip. The way she went suddenly quiet sometimes. The occasional thousand yard stare. She put up a good facade, but he had a feeling her past had been dark in a similar way to how his had been.

Her countenance lost a bit of luster, but gained a tint Harry associated with more real emotion, "Thanks Harry. You guys are nice. I hope I can be in Hufflepuff with you."

They exchanged a smile and both went on their ways.

* * *

Harry, Susan, Hannah, Nym, Neville and Hermione all together entirely filled one of the carriages headed to the castle. They came in and with only a brief altercation with their favorite poltergeist managed their way to the Hufflepuff table.

As Harry sat the whispering around the hall increased, and he could practically feel the number of eyes on him move from the ten his friends supplied to scores from people around the room. He ducked his head and grumbled a bit.

Nym quickly picked up on the source of her friend's distress, and slung an arm around him, giving a gentle squeeze, "We knew you were gonna get stared at, the whole Potter thing was just as bad at the end of last year. Just be normal and it'll be okay. You and me will just glamor our robes and pretend to be Ravenclaws in the halls again. It'll be alright."

Harry briefly pressed his head to her shoulder, causing a smile he couldn't see to light up her face his muffled voice sounded out, "Thanks Nym. I already lost Gabrielle for a year and now I get to be stared at. I don't know what I'd do without you."

Her smile softened, "You'd go down in flames, you big dummy. Don't forget it."

Before too long the line of small and scared first years filed into the great hall. They moved between the ravens and the badgers with timid steps, trying to prepare themselves for the sorting. As she passed, the friends shot smiles and quiet encouragement to Luna.

McGonagall made her way to the front of the room, stool and hat in hand, and after Valentino the Hat's short song, the sorting began. The badgers got their normal share of the group, with only two sortings of note. First, the esteemed Lovegood (a name which reduced the Weasley twins to stitches) sat beneath the hat for a solid minute and a half before it declared her for the Yellow and Black. Harry made room for her on his side not occupied by a slightly jealous metamorph. The second sorting was of the youngest of the Weasley clan, one Ginerva.

Hers was an interesting sort, as she lasted almost as long under Valentino the Hat's brim as Harry had. Five full minutes of facial expressions that showed a venomous argument followed, before she was sorted in the den of the lions. As she stood and made her way to sit near her cheering brothers, Harry caught a longing look at the Hufflepuff table and himself in particular. Something deep inside him told him that he had dodged a bullet.

The feast soon ended, and the friends found their beds. They were all soon asleep; after all, they had a brand new year to start the next morning.


	18. A Dragon, A Bat, And A Ponce

Chapter Seventeen: A Dragon, A Bat, And A Ponce

* * *

The next morning dawned cold and early, before too long the Hufflepuff dormitories bore witness to the sights and sound of a generation of teenagers waking and meeting the day. Harry and Neville quickly finished their morning ablutions and went down to the richly appointed common room. Much could be said of the house of badgers, but no one could bring into question their taste.

The contingent of the fairer sex soon met the boys, and as a group the friends went out to the great hall for their first breakfast. As they entered the hall, they all got their second look at this year's staff table, and again they each couldn't quite believe who occupied it. The last night they had been more tired than anything. Most years the feast was just a stopgap measure before the famous Hogwarts beds saw use. Now that they had time to process what was up, the celebrity in their midst stuck out like a sore thumb (not just because he seemed to be wearing the most eye watering set of cyan robes any of the friends had ever seen).

Sitting at the head table, evidently still wiping the sleep from his eyes, was Gilderoy Lockhart. In the magical world he was something of a folk hero, like Daniel Boone in the colonies, Simo Häyhä to the Fins, or Guy Fawkes more locally. He was a little bit larger than life, a fact not harmed in the least by the number of books written about him. Apparently that was why all of his books were on the required list for this year, he was the new DADA guy. In many ways it was a bit disconcerting to the friends to see him sitting at the staff table and examining his teeth with a hand mirror.

As they all sat down and began their breakfast the first post of the year arrived, and in an interesting twist a steaming howler was seen to arrive in the grasp of an owl that looked like it had seen better decades.

The poor example of the avian species landed in a crash at the table of the brave, directly in front of a certain young Weasley. Hedwig, who loved attending a Hogwarts breakfast, if only for the bacon, quickly moved her head under her wing as a voice that seemed larger than life began screeching.

 **"RONALD BILLIUS WEASLEY! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING! THERE WERE A HUNDRED WAYS YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN TO SCHOOL INSTEAD OF STEALING YOUR FATHER'S CAR! A THOUSAND EVEN! HE IS FACING AN INQUIRY AT WORK, AND YOU ARE THE CAUSE! DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF THOSE DAMNED MUGGLES SAW YOU, FLYING ABOUT IN A CAR? THE TREE YOU HIT IS WORTH MORE AND IS MORE RARE THAN YOU ARE! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TROUBLE WE ARE ALL IN AND-"**

It was hard, but the friends did their best to tune the voice coming from the red envelope out. They couldn't help but feel embarrassed for Weasley. Overall he was a massive prick, but who couldn't feel embarrassed for the kid?

As if on cue, the letter ended and they found out who. Uproarious, sidesplitting laughter began emanating from the Slytherin table, starting next to the most entertaining snake and spreading along the table. After a quick explanation to Hermione about what exactly a howler is, the friends all met eyes. It looked like the idiocy of the Ron/Draco feud wasn't going to be joining Quirrell in the things about first year no one would miss.

For all of the friends save Luna, the first lesson of the year would end up being Herbology. Luna had the good fortune of seeing Professor McGonagall for her first lesson. The friends made sure to assure her and their other firsties that McGonagall was stern but fair. Harry was sure to whisper his suspicion that she was a lot less stern than she appeared, but she was a huge stickler for the rules, so Luna should really consider cutting down on calling folks 'bloody plonkers'. The students all left for their books before heading to class.

The friends all headed outside for the first foray into the greenhouses for the year. As they left the castle and began their journey they spotted the unflappable professor Sprout laden down with what looked like hospital wing standard bandages and a bag of clinking vials. Her expression was strained, Harry noted, and she was closely followed by Professor Lockhart, who was loudly describing ways he had seen of healing similar trees that he had encountered in his travels. Privately Harry was impressed, if what he was describing worked, he had seen some truly impressive stuff. He couldn't help but anxiously anticipate the upcoming class.

For a moment the adult cloaked in what even the girls had to say was a tastelessly bright robe locked eyes with the young nobleman. Harry picked up a weighing and calculating impression from the man. An involuntary shiver passed through the boy. He couldn't help but think that maybe that's how a number of dark creatures had felt before their demise.

The friend's first lesson was a crash course in _mandragora_ , one of magical agriculture's more useful specimens. The mandrake restorative draught was widely used as a sort of panacea for any kind of physically altering trauma. Harry and Nym spent a few minutes speculating on the effect it would have on their physiology, but passed it off as a bad job. Sprout had explained that the magical properties of the disturbingly humanoid root were rooted, if the pun was pardonable, in a return to one's natural state. Specifically to humanoids. Their natural states were change, so honestly it was a craps shoot that neither desired to experiment too much with. Despite their work in advancing their natural talents, bot had a healthy fear, especially after the most recent ritual mishap that Harry had gone through, of combining external magical influences with their own transitory natures. It was a recipe for an unknown magical reaction, which experience taught them was a bad idea.

Following their lesson was a brief round of showers to ward off the pervasive influence of dragon dung fertilizer, lunch, and a second straight class with the house of the lions. Defense against the dark arts.

While Dumbledore and Nicholas Flamel held the titles of widest known and most powerful wizards in the European theatre, Lockhart occupied the enviable position of most popular. The former wizards were all from the last generation (or more honestly, harry figured, like three generations back), Lockhart was the wizard of the 1990s. Brand new and kicking. His exploits, chronicled in his own hand and widely read, were the stuff of urban legend. His looks not hurting any of these facts in the least.

The kids were all eagerly anticipating their first exposure to what could only have been one of the most experienced wizards of the age. They entered the classroom to find that it had been changed entirely from the last year. Quirrell's room had been dark, with garlands of garlic hanging from the ceiling beams and crosses made of silver and wood peppered across the room. Voldy and his servant had really been playing the vampire angle. The windows in the room had been covered by thick black cloth and the light had been supplied by innumerable candles in the shape of human spinal columns and Hogwarts standard torches.

Lockhart had the windows exposed and cleaned, filling the room with natural light. The walls were covered in enchanted posters of him, each grinning like a loon and exposing the smile that had won the Witch Weekly best smile competition a bunch of times. Lockhart had hung the skeleton of what looked like a small dragon, Harry's guess was Peruvian Vipertooth, from the ceiling. The whole place just threw off a Lockhart vibe, which was okay in the friend's books.

The students all sat down and many placed their books on the desk, the pile of seven blocking their gaze of the front of the classroom entirely. There was an air of anticipation in the air as this would be the first defense class Lockhart had this year, and they were eagerly awaiting his words.

When everyone was finally situated, there was a beat of silent tension, before the door to the defense office (up a short set of stairs at the front end of the room) was thrown open and the man himself made his dramatic entrance.

He began speaking as he walked down the steps to the class's level, "Hello my young pupils! Welcome to both of our first defense periods of the year! I've been looking forward to this moment all summer, and now finally it's here. You all will have the most excellent opportunity to pick my brain and get experience that will help each of you one day perhaps be as accomplished as I am," He reached the bottom of the steps and preened for a moment, boffing his fingernails briefly against his shirt and examining them in the light of the window he was silhouetted against. Unbidden, Hedwig sent him an image of her doing the exact same thing with her claws and he had to suppress a laugh.

"I am Gilderoy Norman Jasper Lockhart esquire, Order of Merlin third class recipient, honorary member of the Dark Force Defense League, five time winner of Witch Weekly's most charming smile award," _Five, THAT was the number_ , Harry thought, "and Inventor of the world's finest shampoo, based on my own research of the follicle based properties of occamy eggs. I've saved no less than five villages of people from nightmarish horrors of the worst sort, and I've fought yeti, werewolves, and banshees to the death in hand to hand combat."

He paused there, as if for applause, but the class was a mixture of overwhelmed by his charm and hanging on his every word. He continued, "My plan for the first day is to see how much you all know already of my various and sundry accomplishments, so there will be a short quiz before we begin in earnest!"

He gave his wand a stab and wave move towards a pile of what were evidently to be their tests, thoroughly flubbing the spell and causing the pile to burst into flames. There were shrieks from across the classroom, some from people scared of the fire (Their unfortunate Weasley classmate), some from people who were terrified to see Lockhart do something wrong (The Brown and Patil girls from the Gryffs who loved their makeup and gossip) and one from a girl who hated to see someone deface a quiz.

Lockhart looked horrified around the room and quickly announced, "NOT TO WORRY not to worry! I have this under control!"

The nightmare in blue-green sent a _ventus_ at the pile of burning paper, thinking he would blow the fire out, but really only sending flaming paper into the faces of the people in the first row and distributing hot ash around the room. Thankfully the front row consisted of the friends. Harry, Nym, and Susan all threw up shields, blocking the students off of the fire and unfortunately causing the wind to redirect the papers both up and back at the caster of the spell.

Lockhart burst into girly screams as a small piece of one of his rapidly oxidizing quizzes landed in his hair and set whatever product he used aflame. Harry could only start chuckling as the walking matchstick began running back and forth, smacking himself in the head in a vain attempt to save his hair so he could one day again be vain.

The man did a full circle of the room before Harry realized he should do something before Lockhart's brain fried. He nudged Nym, and performed an _aguamenti._ The blast of water put out the flaming professor drenching him entirely in the process. The man spluttered under the aquatic assault, and when Harry and his female counterpart let their spells die, before them stood the stunning opposite of the man who had walked down the steps into the room not five minutes before.

Lockhart's robes, when wet, turned an ugly dark vomit-like color. His hair was singed, black in some place and falling out in others, and hung flat to his face obscuring half of it. The man's hands and forehead both looked like they need burn treatments, with small blisters forming on them as they student's watched. The man looked like a kicked puppy that had been accidently set on fire; a comparison which Harry felt may not have been too far off the mark at the moment.

The professor, having taken a moment to calm down after being hosed down, took one look at a mirror on the wall and without saying a word sprinted straight for the door. Neglecting to watch his steps, he tripped on a desk that had been knocked over by a student worried about the flaming paper, and crashed to the ground, impacting the floor face first and hard, knocking himself square out.

The classroom was dead silent and unmoving for a full minute. Ron Weasley was being held in the arms of Dean Thomas, who had caught him as he jumped to get away from the fire. Lavender Brown, Pavarti Patil, and the rest of the Gryffindor girls all wore disturbingly identical expressions of dismay and fear. Harry couldn't take his eyes from the lump of professor on the floor.

"Umm. I'm gonna call that as a class dismissed. Do any of you Gryffindor types want to come with me and take him to the hospital wing? I'd like a non-Hufflepuff to be there to confirm the story of… this," Harry said into the silent room.

He got a shaky nod from the gossipy lions, and began packing his things.

It was an interesting first lesson.

* * *

The next day the second year 'Puffs had their first Potions lesson, and it too was an interesting one for the group.

Severus Snape had not, it seemed, missed the fact that Harry had revealed a portion of his heritage at the end of the last year. In the two weeks before the semester ended after Harry let that fact go, he had only seen Snape three times, so it hadn't been a big deal. It seemed that the dour potions master wasn't going to continue that pattern.

Where before in potions he had only been a minor nuisance, essentially leaving the badgers and ravens to their own devices, now he came after Harry specifically with a vengeance. The entire first lesson, after leaving the instructions on the board that is, he simply stood behind Harry and commented on his brewing technique.

They were working on a simple draught, actually a review from the last year, which cured one's acne. The only thing of note with the process was that if an incorrect amount of powdered hippogryph claw were added in addition to leaving it over heat for too long, it formed something very much like mundane thermite. Not necessarily explosive, but it burns so hot that it could melt through the magically strengthen cauldron and work table straight through the floor. At one point Harry questioned how a potion intended to get rid of one's spots could do that, but he had been forced again to conclude that magic was weird and let it go.

As Harry approached that step in the process, he noticed his caldron seem to flicker for an instant. Writing it off as a consequence of the volume of fumes in the air with no outlet, he just kept going. After making double-sure of the amount he was adding (he knew about the bad reaction because of rumors about what happened in the Gryffindor section to Weasley), he put it in and set the next step in motion, only for the liquid in his cauldron to go bright vivid orange, and start emitting heat well above what the burner he had it on should have been capable of.

Snape immediately vanished his work, "It's amusing, Potter," He said mockingly, "It so like your father to make a foolish mistake and endanger your fellow students, twenty points from Hufflepuff for being a dangerous imbecile."

Harry wasn't pleased.

After class, he compared his notes with all of the friends. Neville always had trouble, but he knew so much about the plants involved that he was the go to man for an explanation about why any given reaction had happened. Hermione knew the instructions front to back, and Hannah had an almost preternatural talent for understanding what happened in any given potion at any given time.

Neville confirmed his understanding of what could have, and evidently did go wrong. Hannah had been next to him during the lesson though, and confirmed that he had done every step right. They couldn't figure it out.

* * *

The friend's next DADA lesson was _significantly_ more subdued than the last. It was a rough toss-up in Harry's mind as to whether or not the first class was run into the ground by incompetence or bad luck. He knew his own particular brand of fortune, so Harry decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Nym and Neville, one being immune to appearances and the other being unattracted to the man, were both in the same place.

Susan, Hannah, and Hermione were all looking forward to having a real lesson with the man. To everyone's amusement, Hermione actually had drawn small hearts around Lockhart's block in her schedule. Harry was pretty certain he was the only one to notice that Hannah quickly hid her schedule when the friends saw Hermione's.

The class itself began with Lockhart firmly planted in a seat at the head of the room. There was no quiz this time, instead Lockhart called out Harry to re-enact scenes from his heroic battle with the Wagga Wagga Werewolf.

Of course, Harry did his best to re-form himself into a werewolf. He gained a full meter in height and added something like two stone of muscle to his frame. When he began growing hair everywhere and reforming his face to a much more canine look, Lockhart actually screamed a little and with his voice cracking slightly said, "NO! No! I meant for you to er... retain your usual form. No need to frighten the other students!"

Harry took a brief look at the class, everyone seemed intrigued by his transformation, the only person not looking interested was Nym, who was wearing a very superior air, as if she felt she could do better, "Professor, they all look okay to me, I just thought I'd add a little authenticity. I can change my muscles density to something pretty close to a werewolf, so you should be able to show exactly how you put it down. You don't need to worry about me, I heal pretty fast so you shouldn't be able to hurt me."

The adult still looked like he might wet himself if Harry started growling, his look only got worse when a few of the other student made noises of agreement, "Err... well okay," he gulped audibly, "I suppose we could do that."

Harry finished the shift in his face from human to lycan, elongating his jaw considerably and expanding his teeth. The class was almost immediately treated to the surreal sight of a werewolf failing to fight off a huge sneeze, "AAAACHOOOO! ... Woah, sorry professor, your cologne is just really strong with a canine nose. More sensitive you know. Excuse me."

Nym briefly shifted her nose to match Harry's before sneezing herself in agreement.

Ignoring the fact that his students were roughly half his size, and in fact far too young for any technique to help them against an actual werewolf, Lockhart picked up his book with shaky hands and started in, "Well let's see, yes, the werewolf came directly at me, as Harry and I are oriented now, the beast was on all fours," Harry obligingly moved, "And it was charging full tilt at me."

Harry moved in an exaggerated manner towards the professor.

"I put both my hands together in a double fist, and as it came in range I struck its head to the side!"

Harry continued his exaggerated walk right up to the professor, who made a fist with his right hand, folded his left over it, and with a move worthy of Harry's favorite captain of the Enterprise, smacked him in the side of the head. Lockhart had put a bit of force into the blow, enough to make it convincing without hurting him, but Harry nearly stood back up in confusion.

Canine skulls connected more at the back of the skull than the bottom, as human do. The werewolf form carried that along, and coupled with it went a drastic expansion of upper body muscles, especially along the trapezius and deltoid muscles. It was why werewolves were able to run on all fours. A strike to the side of the head of a werewolf wouldn't be like a similar move on a human, the muscles around there just wouldn't let the head move very far laterally. The move Lockhart just described would have made the werewolf angry, and very little else.

He decided to let it go.

Lockhart continued, "The hit diverted the slavering monster to my left and into the ground!"

Harry followed the action the professor was excitedly describing, but his mind refused to stop pointing out that inertia just didn't work this way, at least not without a blow that would have broken both of the attractive wizard's forearms.

"While he was shaken by the blow I delivered a punishing kick to his chest, and finished it off with a stab to the neck with my trusty silver belt knife! "

The class erupted in applause, which seemed to make Lockhart expand where he stood. The man gave a wide bow as Harry made his way back to his seat. There were a lot of holes in that confrontation, he thought. It was possible for it to have happened that way, but it would require someone like him or a half-giant like Hagrid.

As he sat, Harry met Nym's eyes and saw her raise an eyebrow. Yep. She had spotted it too. The rest of the class was dedicated to the same material the book covered, namely the best ways to arrange one's hair during a fight, and how to not chip a nail during the same.

The metamorphs sighed.

* * *

The week ended, and as it did, new trouble made its way into the friend's lives.

Saturday morning they made their way up from the badger's dungeon home to the great hall for breakfast, and as they sat down Harry noticed something strange from the Gryffindor table.

The stares from the school had actually dropped off during the week, and the whispers that seemed to stop when Harry or any of the others entered the room also seemed to be happening less. When the legendary Hogwarts rumor mill figured out that Harry Potter was actually no different than Harry Bones had been (being harder to find when he didn't want to be notwithstanding), most people seemed content to just let it go. All of which was exactly why as they sat for breakfast two first year lions staring directly at harry, not moving, eating, or talking, seemed unusual.

Harry went for a normal porridge, Nym her favored bacon and eggs, Susan, Hannah, and Neville all preferred fruit, and Hermione went with coffee and toast. After a moment, Luna joined them at their table, a plain bacon sandwich adorning her plate as a pair of gentle bobbing and floating plums adorned her ears.

Harry sat next to Nym, and was playing his morning game of seeing how red he could turn Nym before she either threatened to, or just straight up stabbed him. Luna took the seat to Harry other side, and as he began floating all the bacon just outside her reach. With a smile, Luna removed her own wand and began floating the pieces closer to Nym, putting them inside her reach. Harry harrumphed and began working harder to make the rashers dance a bit farther away.

A smile pierced Nym's normal morning malaise as she elongated her arm slightly to snatch the pieces Luna floated closer.

After thoroughly distracting the pair of metamorphs from their daily breakfast game, Luna reminded Harry of his earlier observation, "I saw you noticed them earlier. They're still looking you know."

Harry lost concentration on his spell, the final piece of bacon he was playing with falling directly into Nym's eggs, splashing egg fragments onto her robes, "What do you mean?"

As Nym scowled and murmured _scourgify_ , Luna indicated the table behind her where the young lions were still directing an unblinking gaze.

"Who are they? I remember the boy, he's something Creevey. He looked disappointed to be in Gryffindor when he was sorted."

Luna smiled as she responded, "Well if who he's sitting with is any indication, I know why."

Nym's floating blob of porridge danced above Harry's head as he said, "Well given the red hair she's probably a Weasley, but what's her name?"

The dreamy blonde's smile widened as the blob slowly descended towards the back of Harry's robes, "Her name is Ginerva. She prefers Ginny. The Weasleys live near me in Ottery St. Catchpole, I used to play with her when we were both younger. She is somewhat... obsessed with the boy who lived. She used to make me act out marriage ceremonies with her."

Harry's expression darkened, Luna's continued brightening.

"I received the honor of standing in for the esteemed Harry Potter. After her mum caught us re-enacting the wedding for the fourth time she never came over to play anymore."

"Well at least all the creepy stalker types are all gathering in one place. Makes avoiding them easier I suppose."

Luna made noises of agreement as lukewarm porridge found its way down the shirt boy sitting across from her. Her dreamy smile reached the limits of her face as his cries of indignation filled the air.

* * *

Later that day, after bewitched porridge found its way inside Nym's shirt, retaliatory porridge was slung at Harry and hit Neville, Susan and Hannah conjured porridge all over both Harry and Nym for interrupting their teasing of their favorite male friend, and everyone took a shower and changed clothes again, Harry, Nym and Neville al went out to see Hagrid.

The half-giant's dragon egg had hatched during the summer, and with the support of the centaur herd in the forest and a few of the wood nymphs who lived in the forest he had begun raising and training the Norwegian Ridgeback.

From letters Harry received in the messy scrawl of his oathsworn friend the family knew that the dragon was responding well to the love and training it was receiving from its somewhat unusual adopted family. Dragons, it seemed, were like highly intelligent, massive, and deadly dogs. They took direction well if started on it at an early age, and they loved to pee on trees.

Hagrid named his newest and arguably deadliest pet Norbert, and according to his letters was incredibly embarrassed when the chieftain of the centaur herd revealed that the dragon was in fact a female. It turned out that dragons imprinted on the first being they saw when they hatched, and that once named, they didn't take well to changes.

Overall, the three were really excited to meet Norbert the lady dragon.

So far the dragon hadn't been noticed by any regulatory body, and by the lack of reaction from the staff room they assumed that she had also escaped the notice of the headmaster. In an effort to keep that going, Hagrid met them at his cabin and led them deep into the forest. The acromantula were usually a big and deadly concern to anyone going into the forest, but with a fire-breathing dragon flying freely around the forest, the spiders had retreated to the absolute depths of their territory.

Before any of the three knew it, they happened into a massive clearing. At the center of it was a mound of rocks piled on top of one another. It was obviously a magical construction, as it was clearly a pile of rocks but a massive yawning hole was open on one side. A thin cloud of smoke continuously wafted from the top of the hole. The three teenagers shared a glance. No one needed the full three guesses to figure out where the dragon was being kept.

As they came closer, Harry began feeling a bit of the magic rolling off of the place. It was another presence like what he felt when he came back to Hogwarts, or what he felt when he went near the forest. As usual though, it was different. The pile felt... fiery? And it had a hint of something that was like the smell of dry ground right when it starts to ran. When you can see the drops of water fall from the sky and hit the ground, each raising its own small cloud of earth. Then there was a smidge, just a soupçon of something that felt like Hagrid.

If he had to guess, Hagrid and the centaurs had gotten together and built this shelter for the forest's new protector. And when Norbert moved in she brought the natural magic that filled a dragon with her.

It was interesting; Harry had to stop for a moment and close his eyes, drinking in the strange feelings.

"Norbert! Norby! Where are ya lass? I got a few new friend here ter meet ya!"

A large puff of smoke from the artificial cave answered Hagrid's call. After a moment, a massive scaled head poked out of the hole. Norbert was a deep and dark green, so dark it seemed like it was almost black. She blinked her eye a few times, as if adjusting to the light outside her home.

"C'mere, girl!," Hagrid called out as he clapped Harry on the shoulder, "This here's yer lord, without him someone woulda taken ye away from me. So just like we practiced now, yeah?"

At that the dragon left its cave and ambled over to the people. It moved slowly and calmly, which was excellent as there were at least three being present who would have soiled themselves should there have been any fast or suspicious movement.

When she got near the kids, she stopped and brought her great head down to the young one's eye level. turning her head to the side so he one massive eye peeked down at him, Norbert seemed to look deeply at Harry, as if weighing and judging him. Harry felt his blood pressure spike, Hedwig whispered calming nothings in the back of his head, and the small piece of him that was attached to Gabrielle seemed concerned. Norbert took an immense sniff of the boy, the strength of her breathing causing his robes to flutter and be pulled towards her. With another short look the she-dragon drew herself up to her full height.

Hagrid began grinning as the dragon lowered its head; bring one massive forelimb into its chest and folding a wing in alongside in what was unmistakably a bow.

Harry couldn't take it. He just broke down into laughter.

Norbert seemed to almost take offense, but as Hagrid joined Harry in his joyous laughter (Neville and Nym managing only quiet and scared chuckles), she seemed to catch the humor.

"Lady Norbert, I'll have you know I require one thing from all of my vassals, but from you, I will require two," Harry said in an overly pompous tone.

Norbert brought her head in close to the kids again, thoroughly spooking Neville and Nym again. The dragon wore an expression of unmistakable interest and questioning. She wanted to know what Harry wanted.

"I charge you with the protection of this forest and all of its inhabitants. Through Hagrid, I will always take care of you, but in exchange, you must protect this place."

Norbert's face withdrew a few feet as she looked down at her claws. She seemed to be weighing her options again before shaking her head in an unmistakable yes.

"Excellent! The other thing I require is something Hagrid has already done for me, but if you would grant me this boon I would be forever grateful."

The draconian head moved back in to the students and their massive escort.

Harry opened his arms wide and with his best puppy dog eyes called out to the dragon, "Hug?"

* * *

After the first week ended, a fairly calm routine made itself known. The friends continued to do excellently in their classes, whether from genuine personal skill or from advice from some of history's foremost thinkers in most of the fields they studied.

Godric's journals alongside James' brought the friends through transfiguration with flying colors. Ravenclaw and Lily did much the same for charms. Lily's notes contained a number of excellent insights into the potions brewing process, but sadly did not have wisdom about why exactly Harry's potions always seemed to fail in the worst possible manner.

When his withering potion nearly gassed the classroom after his swelling solution nearly formed a form of magical nitroglycerin, the friends gave up. The two theories they had were that either Professor Snape was trying to kill him, or his ability to make potions was literally cursed.

Defense turned into another joke class. Since the first day when Lockhart knocked himself out, they only seemed to reenact his exploits in class. His books were mostly about how to look good battling evil, but they were each suspiciously light on the battling evil part of the deal. The friends really hoped his class would be the part of his adventures that his books lacked, but two weeks was enough to teach them otherwise.

Harry and Nym shared their thoughts on the flaws in the pretty-boy's werewolf technique. Hannah was quick to point out that only a demi-human would even consider closing with a werewolf to begin with. Lycanthropy only affected 'pure' humans, so Lockhart would have to have been insane to consider hand to hand with one.

His other lessons had similar flaws in them. Only someone who was literally deaf could get close enough to a banshee to punch it. No known silencing spell was effective against their magically enhanced shrieks. His descriptions and pantomimes of tracking down a family of yeti were no less ludicrous. Yetis were known for their elusiveness. That only the vaguest rumors of their existence had ever reached the mundane world was proof enough of it. It would take a master woodsman to find and stalk a family group of them, and given the fact that the golden haired professor routinely tripped on his way down the stairs from his office, his stories stunk.

Either he was lying about how he did his feats, or he hadn't been the one to do any of them.

Hermione, Susan, and Hannah were quick to jump to his defense, but neither had counterclaims for the arguments Harry and Nym put forward.

Outside of class, the two creepy Gryffindor first years began following Harry around, and they didn't seem to stop their staring. Harry and Nym solved the issue by glamoring their robes to look like other houses' and morphing to other features. Luna simply laughed at them, and in a voice that said she knew something they didn't told them that it wouldn't be enough.

Harry and Nym went out to visit Hagrid every weekend.

All in all, it was a normal year. Right up until Harry's least favorite day of the year.


End file.
